O’Brien gives us a “pithy summary” of Thomas Aquinas’s ethics by quoting from the Summa Contra Gentiles: “We do not offend God unless we act contrary to our own nature.” That is indeed a good summary of much contemporary Thomistic ethics, according to which we consult our nature for the content of moral norms, and God’s commands for the obligatory force of those norms. And it is a rare point of disagreement between O’Brien and myself, since I agree with him on many things: that there would be no morality without God; that part of morality involves giving God what is due to Him; that in the absence of divine revelation it would be difficult to adhere to absolute moral norms in situations of emergency; that God has legitimate authority; and that His commands “make perspicuous” what we ought and ought not to do.

But we get a better picture of Aquinas’s ethics if we accurately quote Thomas, who writes that we do not offend God “unless we act contrary to our own good,” (nisi ex eo quod contra nostrum bonum agimus). This situates ethics squarely on a foundation of human good, rather than human nature, which is a good thing, since human goods give reasons for action in a way that “conformity with human nature” does not. It becomes intelligible why absolutely impermissible actions are never to be done, since in themselves (i.e., apart from their consequences) such actions are intended to do nothing but damage, destroy, or thwart basic goods, basic aspects of human well-being.

How are those goods related to our final end? It is difficult to see how if one takes our natural end as human beings to be the beatific vision. Better, in my view, is the idea that our natural end is life in communion with all persons, enjoying and pursuing all the goods of persons. We know by revelation that this end will be realized in the Kingdom of Heaven in a way it can never be on earth; but that end provides a focal point for human willing even now: willing that is compatible with such a final end is upright, but willing that is not so compatible is deficient, disordered.

Here we see a great difference between my account of absolutes and Miller’s. Miller says rightly that what is important is the ordering of action to the final end; but he sees that order as largely causal: “claims that certain actions are always wrong are based on claims about the causal structure of the world—claims that certain causes will not have certain effects, regardless of circumstances.”

This sets up the difficulty of establishing what effects we are responsible for, and which consequences of acts are relevant. Miller settles for those effects that are ours, relatively proximate, and, as regards the particular acts in question, ut in pluribus—i.e., for the most part, knowing that effects oft go astray.

But I think that the order that matters for morality is the order of willing, not the order of natural causality. Morality is a matter of the heart, of willing in accordance with our final end. The norm for such willing could be put thus: will only in a way that is in accordance with integral personal fulfillment. An agent who only willed in accordance with this norm would will, in fact, the natural end of man; and would be, in so willing, suited for that end, were that end to be realized. One who wills contrary to human goods, by contrast, unfits himself for that end, a circumstance certainly to be repented of.

So my account of moral absolutes is not that they involve acts whose consequences are, for the most part, contrary to the end of man, but that they involve acts the willing of which is always contrary to that end. I think Miller could (and should) embrace my view, without difficulty: what could be more out of line with a “community of good will” than intending the death of an innocent human being? Accordingly, the will of any who intended, for example, the deaths of innocents in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to say nothing of the many other allied bombing campaigns that targeted innocents—was deficient, disordered; no one, ever or anywhere, should will what they willed.

Let me turn to the question of God’s commands, of which O’Brien makes much. In my earlier discussion, I made the traditional argument that divine commands cannot generate obligations unless there is some reason to obey such commands, a reason that cannot be generated by the commands themselves. O’Brien counters that “a divine command gives you a new reason for doing what the command requires, because God has legitimate authority.” I agree with this: God does have legitimate authority. But both legitimacy and authority are already fully loaded normative notions, and it seems to me that God has neither by virtue of His commands.

I have also argued that God’s commands are not necessary for understanding the obligation-making force of the prescriptions of the natural law. But it is a view common to natural law thinkers that God, recognizing epistemic and motivational deficiencies in human beings vis-a-vis the natural law, provides revealed commands as a supplement. So, if we abstract from the Miller-like suggestion of natural causality, I agree with O’Brien’s claim that God’s “commands make perspicuous to you those acts and omissions without which you cannot reach your final end.” But “making perspicuous” and “making absolutely obligatory” are not the same thing.

My final remarks on the subject of divine commands will be brief and tentative. As is obvious, the idea of divine command exercises a strong hold over both theistic ethics and Christian practice; I will call that idea the “dominant picture.” I want here to investigate whether the dominant picture should be resisted in certain ways. Specifically, I want to raise some perplexities in which I find myself when considering the image of God as divine commander, which can be summarized as follows: why must God’s authoritative and directive speech acts to us be thought of as commands or imperatives?

Well, what are the options? One might think that commands just are the form of speech act—the only such form—by which an authority directs as an authority, and as I have said, I agree that God has authority. So it might seem obvious that the dominant picture is correct.

Nevertheless, consider the following: I have authority over my children, and while I sometimes command them, sometimes I direct without command. I say, for instance, why don’t we do it this way? Or: it would please me if we were to do it this way. Or: I’ve decided that we’ll do it this way. Not everything that I say to them is in the imperative voice.

Perhaps my alleged counterexamples are disguised commands: when I say “Why don’t we do it this way?” I might just be commanding politely. But we should consider the possibility that at least some of the counterexamples are instead authoritative invitations. I have authority, and it is not just the authority of expertise, of knowing what is the best way: my decisions constitute in some cases what will now be the common—and hence best—way in the family, and my announcement of that common way is an act of authority. But I take myself not to be commanding the way but announcing it as an available option for those in the family who wish, in the choice itself, to continue their cooperation with me as the head of our merry little band, and to play their part in that band.

In so acting, I announce no external sanctions for those who fail to comply, as I do on other occasions when I tell my children that they must do such and such, or suffer some punishment. But there is an internal sanction built in, that of failing to act (a) in cooperation with me; and (b) in accordance with the common way, which is partly constitutive of our existence as a family. Because following my will is necessary to avoid these internal sanctions, and for familial well-being, we can further speak of the necessity, or virtue, of obedience for members of my family. God, it seems to me, speaks in this way to us when he shows us His way, and invites us to join Him in it.

But what about when God supplements the natural law with His commands? The precepts of the natural law are obligatory not because they are commanded, but because they are necessary for our well-being with one another and with God. What is added by God’s commanding them? For one thing, we now know we will be separated from God if we willingly disobey the precepts of the natural law, and this is undesirable: friendship with God is a human good to be pursued. So a reason for obedience is thus superadded to the obligations internal to the natural law itself. But how is God’s revelation of precepts of the natural law better understood here as a divine commanding, rather than, say, a divine reminding and authoritative inviting?

One might say: because God’s commands are backed by the threat of coercive sanction, the threat of hell. However, a more plausible view is that hell is the separation of the sinning self from God’s presence; so hell is not an imposed punishment, and threats about hell are actually warnings. In the commandments, God reminds us what the natural law is, and what the intrinsic consequences of failure in the natural law are.

The image of God that emerges from these reflections, and of His relationship to us as we share in His providence through our acts of practical reason and choice, is rather different from the image of God as one who commands obedience and is offended by disobedience. So perhaps what I am really trying to articulate is this: that our view of God’s communication of the law, natural and divine, has been somewhat deformed by our relying too closely on an analogy to the imperative form of speech act associated with human positive law. Echoing O’Brien, I would suggest that the debate over moral absolutes is only one among a number of areas in which that deformation has had its effect.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is the author, with Robert P. George, of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, the second edition of which recently has been released. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2012 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Fr. Miscamble notes that my critique is “hardly original.” Without a doubt: He cites as precedent the work of Anscombe, Grisez, Finnis, Boyle, and Veritatis Splendor. I had quoted Gaudium et Spes, but could have instead quoted Pius XII, or any major figure from the Catholic tradition who had considered the matter. Aquinas, for example, writes that it is “in no way lawful to slay the innocent” (ST, 2–2, q. 64, a. 6, c.). The condemnation of the intentional killing of the innocent is as firmly taught a moral precept in the Catholic tradition as any.

In fact, this utter lack of originality points to my deepest underlying worry with Fr. Miscamble’s book, at which I gestured toward the end of my review. The question I put to Fr. Miscamble is whether the demands of pro-life, and indeed Catholic, integrity should call forth more than the casual dismissal that the teaching of Veritatis Splendor receives in his essay. Because I think it renders both absolute opposition to abortion and any demand to absolute obedience to the Church incoherent, I am deeply disturbed by his willingness, also displayed by other Catholic reviewers of his book such as Fr. Michael Orsi or Michael Novak, selectively to abandon Church teaching on the ethics of killing when the good of the nation is at stake.

Miscamble rests his defense of Truman, it seems, on a willingness to accept that Truman pursued the least of the evil options available to him. Miscamble’s judgment is that the atomic bombing was “in isolation … a deeply immoral act.” Because it resulted in the least loss of life and ended a bloody war, however, Miscamble apparently believes Truman’s decision to have been justified.

At the same time, Miscamble denies that he accepts a utilitarian approach to morality, “in which good ends can justify certain immoral actions.” But either Miscamble believes that the bombing was not immoral precisely because it brought about the least bad state of affairs, in which case his reasoning is indeed utilitarian, or he thinks that Truman’s action was both immoral and somehow justified. His advertence to Machiavelli suggests the latter; but here again we have something deeply contrary both to the Catholic moral tradition and, I think, to sound reason.

The insistent voice of the New Testament is one demanding moral perfection: “as my Father in heaven is perfect.” Such demands are met with astonishment by the apostles: “if that is true, better that no man should marry.” But Christ never backs down from these demands, never softens them with the counsel to choose the “lesser” evil.

Nor does subsequent tradition embrace “lesser evil” thinking; rather, with St. Paul, it embraces the principle that evil is never to be done that good—including, surely, the good of avoiding a greater evil—come about. How that tradition can be squared with the idea that anyone, anywhere, could be “forced by necessity to enter into evil” eludes me entirely, and we are given no indication in Fr. Miscamble’s essay of how to square this circle.

Rather, we are given the red herring that my approach is too “abstract,” and the accusation that I have offered “no serious proposals regarding a viable alternative.”

The charge of “abstractness” is truly a red herring. If there are moral absolutes—principles asserting that certain kinds of acts are never to be done—they are unavoidably general, and their applicability is not changed by circumstances, so long as the kind of act in question remains the same. No amount of “getting into the head” of the adulterer or abortion-seeker, no amount of attention to the “hard circumstances” of the contraceptor, will change the moral judgment of the licitness of adultery, abortion, or contraception. Such sympathetic engagement is certainly necessary in order to avoid unwarranted judgment of the person; but that is a different matter, and I did not, I should note, ever “denounce Truman as a ‘mass-murderer.’”

Moreover, I deny the responsibility to give much consideration to viable alternatives in this case. What the best options were for Truman, once immoral options had been ruled out, was a matter of military expertise and prudence. I am doubtful that those options would have been whittled down to doing “absolutely nothing.” After all, it is something of an historical contingency that the atomic bomb was completed when it was, and Truman should have been prepared to do something, again within the bounds of the moral, without it.

I want again to reiterate my admiration for Fr. Miscamble and his pro-life witness; it is because I share with him a recognition that this most radical cause is also today’s most important moral issue that I am as “forthright” as I am in voicing disagreement with his judgment about Truman’s choice. For the reasons I have detailed above, I do suspect that the pro-life garment is in danger of unraveling, a suspicion that seems confirmed by consideration of the record for human life in the years since World War II. “Forced by necessity to enter into evil” has been a justification every bit as available to private individuals as to heads of state, with lethal consequences for the unborn.

Matthew O’Brien joins the debate over the intentional killing of the innocent to make a more general point about moral absolutes: They cannot be “justified” without belief in a divine legislator.

O’Brien holds this view while also holding that it can be known without such a belief that certain acts are intrinsically evil. I take this to mean that in themselves—apart from their consequences—such acts do nothing but damage human beings or their basic goods. One can know, according to O’Brien, that such acts are intrinsically evil, but without belief in a divine law-giver, one will not be able to know that such acts are never to be done.

Let me identify a thesis, similar to O’Brien’s, with which I agree: Without situating our practical understanding of, and adherence to, moral absolutes, within a larger theistic framework, I think it unlikely that many people, today or ever, will have the moral fortitude to maintain their allegiance to such absolutes in the face of strong temptations. Refusing to lie, though one’s life will be forfeit; refusing to kill an innocent man, though the nation will suffer; or refusing to make use of modern technologies for baby-making or baby-avoiding when great goods and evils are at stake—the price, in many people’s minds, will be felt as simply too high, and they will lose their grip on the moral absolutes. (Robert Miller makes a similar point in his response to O’Brien.) Remembering that, as Christian tradition teaches, for example, our good acts will be redeemed in the Kingdom of Heaven is, I think, essential for most, if not all, of us to keep a motivational grip on our allegiance to moral absolutes.

But recognizing that an action is intrinsically evil seems to me to involve recognition that therefore it is not to be done unless a rational justification for doing it can be provided. And this is what seems impossible. If deliberately killing tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese is itself “intrinsically evil” (quoting O’Brien) or “deeply immoral” (quoting Miscamble), then there is in it, as such, no good. So it must be justified, if at all, only because the good of its consequences promises to outweigh the evil of the act itself.

In the specific case of Hiroshima, say, as in all other cases of absolutes, I deny that such an outweighing is possible. What, for example, in the lives of Americans saved was as such a greater good than the lives of the Japanese women and children who were killed? Did the lives of those Americans leave the world with all the good of the lives of the killed Japanese and more? Surely not: Those Japanese lives were lost, never to be recovered on this earth. The idea of a “greater good” here makes no sense.

So no justification exists for asserting that something intrinsically evil may or should be done. But some will deny this; should they be convinced if they come to believe that God has commanded that such acts be avoided? I do not see, in O’Brien’s essay or elsewhere, why God’s command should suffice to justify, unless (and here again I admit to an argument that is “hardly original”) it were independently intelligible—justified—that God’s commands were not to be flouted. Otherwise, God is merely being appealed to as someone with the biggest stick, who can offer sufficient rewards and incentives to make doing something otherwise foolish become desirable and rational.

O’Brien makes a second point about the need for God: to hedge against the possibility of tragic dilemmas. I understand such dilemmas, if there are any, to be circumstances in which, whatever an agent does, he will do wrong through no previous fault of his own. Here is where it is essential that moral absolutes are always framed in terms of what is not to be done; positive obligations—to feed one’s family, to show reverence to one’s country, to care for the poor—by contrast, are not, at an abstract level, absolute, and are always limited by the need to comply with the negative absolutes. If feeding one’s family requires murder, then one may not feed them.

Can universal, negative, absolute moral norms ever conflict? O’Brien says that I do not argue for this. But I ask whether anyone has ever shown that not lying means that one will thereby intentionally kill an innocent, or that not intentionally killing an innocent means that one will forswear one’s faith, or that not committing adultery means that one will thereby contracept, and so on. It seems clear that in the limit case, refraining from willing and doing that which would violate every applicable moral absolute will always be a possibility, even if the consequences threatened by other bad men will be awful and such that, in some other set of circumstances, one might have a positive responsibility to prevent them.

There is much else to say here, but, alas, the stocking is full. Disagreement with my pro-life friends is no treat in itself, but I am grateful for their patience, and for a forum such as Public Discourse where internal differences can be aired with honesty and civility. I wish nothing but the best for Fr. Miscamble, Matthew O’Brien, and all others with whom I have had constructive and truth-seeking conversation here over this past year.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a visiting fellow in the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He is the author, with Robert P. George, of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, the second edition of which recently has been released. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Through it all, one voice of pro-life sanity—certainly not the only one, but a voice to take seriously—has been Fr. Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., a professor in the history department. Fr. Miscamble vigorously protested the Obama honors; he has been an important figure in the history of the Center for Ethics and Culture, a pro-life bright spot on the Notre Dame campus; and he leads the campus chapter of University Faculty for Life. His pro-life witness at an essential moment in Notre Dame’s history has been exemplary.

So it is with no pleasure that I venture here to make some criticisms of his recent book, a short history of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Most Controversial Decision is, as history, a great read. Miscamble presents a concise but clear narrative of the events leading up to the attack, especially Truman’s elevation to the duties of the presidency after Roosevelt’s death, for which his preparation at Roosevelt’s hands had been, in Miscamble’s words, a “disgraceful failure.” The race to get Truman up to speed proceeded neck and neck with the race to get the first atomic weapons ready for use. Truman received word of a successful test while returning from the Potsdam conference with Stalin and Clement Atlee, Churchill’s successor. Before he had finished that voyage, Hiroshima became the first city to be attacked with an atomic bomb.

According to Miscamble, neither Truman nor his secretary of state James Byrnes “raised any questions regarding whether the atomic bomb was a legitimate weapon of war.” And, as he points out later, “indiscriminate bombing had become the norm for the Anglo-American forces well before 1945.” I believe that referring to the Japanese attacks, and indeed, previous attacks on Tokyo and Dresden, as “indiscriminate” misstates the matter, to the extent that the word suggests merely a lack of care. Rather, the cities were attacked precisely because they had not only military targets of value, but also because they were large population centers—and thus the label “terror bombing” was aptly applied. Truman himself would describe the atomic bomb as “far worse than gas and biological warfare because it affects the civilian population and murders them by wholesale.” Yet Truman remained ready to drop more bombs than the two that were necessary; and he remained ready to drop more into the future, while praying that “he would never have to make such a decision again.”

What are we to make of this, from a moral point of view? Miscamble rightly distinguishes the question of “necessity” from the question of “morality”; even if the use of the bomb were necessary to shorten the war and save many Americans, and perhaps even some Japanese and other Asian lives, was it a morally defensible decision that Truman made?

By the standards of what philosophers call “common morality,” the answer is clearly in the negative. Common morality is that part of morality that been articulated, developed, and promulgated by the Judeo-Christian tradition, but which also can be known by natural reason. By well before the twentieth century, common morality had coalesced around a principle of just war that those who pose no threat are absolutely not to be intentionally targeted or killed. This principle was acknowledged, but certainly not introduced, by the Second Vatican Council, in its document Gaudium et Spes: “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.” So common morality, and at least the Catholic Church’s magisterial teaching on the matter, agree that non-combatants should never be intentionally targeted for death.

And “never” means “never.” As John Finnis, Joseph M. Boyle, and Germain Grisez explain in their book on nuclear deterrence, “Moral impossibility is as absolute a limit on responsibility as is any other sort of impossibility, and there are kinds of actions which are of themselves wrong, whatever the circumstances and good intentions.” So, as I noted in a recent Public Discourse essay, if one is convinced of the truth of moral absolutes, one must completely rule out their violations from options for action.

No doubt Truman, like Roosevelt before him, was in a difficult position in considering the invasion of Japan. Some philosophers, like Elizabeth Anscombe, have pointed to the Allies’ demand for “unconditional surrender” as contributing to this difficulty: faced with such a demand, with its implied willingness to absolutely dismantle the Japanese state even if it were to surrender (for “unconditional” means, on its surface, that nothing was off the table), there could be little motivation for the Japanese to lay down their arms.

Miscamble directly takes up this challenge, and his portrait of the Supreme War Leadership Council of the Emperor suggests an astonishing willingness on the part of some members to continue the fight even after the second atomic bombing; change in the demand would, he argues, have been interpreted as a sign of weakness. But Miscamble does not, in criticizing Anscombe, address her more fundamental point: that Truman had “certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end,” a claim for which the evidence is overwhelming; nor does he take on her moral evaluation of this as “always murder.”

Instead, Miscamble approaches the issue through a Machiavellian lens, suggesting that a statesman “must come to ruin” if he is not able to make the hard decisions and “learn to be able not to be good.” Miscamble writes of Truman: “within the privacy of his own heart and soul it is likely that Truman understood he had been forced by necessity to enter into evil. And, so indeed, he had.”

But the idea of being faced with and forced by necessity into doing evil—such as violating the moral absolute against intentional killing of the innocent, or indeed any other moral principle—is no part of common morality. In fact, moral absolutes are framed, as I argued in my previous essay, in terms of intentional acts precisely because it is always possible to refrain from an action whose intention would be contrary to a human good. The deliberate killing of “the innocent elderly and the sick, women and children” is precisely such an action: always and deeply contrary to the good of human life, always and everywhere to be avoided in one’s choices and actions.

The Machiavellian idea, in fact, is deeply opposed to common morality and the tradition of moral absolutes in its pretense that the life of the successful public servant is incompatible with adherence to such absolutes (and to other forms of virtue as well). Common morality does indeed identify acts that only public authorities can perform, such as taxation and imprisonment of felons, but never on grounds that public authorities are exempt from an absolute that governs all agents.

The Machiavellian position, like the position that accepts that moral absolutes must be violated in cases of “supreme emergency,” is also unstable. If no moral absolutes for public servants, who are, after all, only human beings, then no moral absolutes at all. So if one can be forced by necessity into killing the innocents on a grand scale for the great good of the state, then why cannot one be “forced” into such killing on a small scale for the sake of one’s career, education, mental well-being, or family stability?

Thus we come inevitably to the more immediately pressing issues of pro-life consistency and witness. Consistency because the pro-life view identifies a universal moral claim as underwriting its commitment to the unborn: all innocent human beings are to be held absolutely immune from intentionally inflicted harm or death. Snip that thread in the ethics of war, and the entire pro-life garment, covering the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly, begins to unravel. And witness because the pro-life cause is furthered not only by arguments, but by a willingness on the part of pro-life citizens to live out their commitments with an acknowledgment that sometimes those commitments require difficult choices: choices of personal, and even political, sacrifice.

It might well be true that greater suffering would have resulted from a refusal to use the atomic weapons in Japan, or to firebomb Tokyo, or Dresden before that. In fact, these claims cannot be known with certainty, and also could be false. Commitment to the moral principles of common morality, however, is not, and never has been, conditioned on the idea that adherence to those principles would never be demanding: witness all those killed for their refusal to foreswear their faith. To plead for greater “understanding” of the evils that Truman avoided, or the difficulties that he faced, is one thing; but to excuse his choices as “necessary” evils, required for the greater good, is to abandon our post as witnesses to the truth that pro-life principles are immutable and without exception.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the author, with Robert P. George, of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, the second edition of which recently has been released. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The natural law view that underlies much of what I have written for Public Discourse is rooted in the idea of St. Thomas Aquinas that the principles of the natural law are directives toward human goods that are aspects of human well-being. Moving beyond St. Thomas, we could say that each basic good gives to human agents a basic reason for action, rooted in those aspects of human well-being and perfection promised by instances of those goods. But there are many such goods: human life and health, knowledge, aesthetic experience, work and play, friendship, marriage, personal integrity, and the good of religion.

Faced with a plurality of goods, the moral question is this: what should one do when one is faced with competing options in the pursuit of goods, options that are not all mutually pursuable? The suggestion that I make here is that one should be always and entirely open to all the goods, in all persons, and never act directly or intentionally against any of the goods in any persons. “Openness” here should be understood to encompass the demand of the goods that they be promoted and protected: one is not open to basic aspects of human well-being if one always does nothing. The goods call, in various ways, for action on their behalf. But in all such action, the core negative requirement of morality is that one never intentionally act so as to damage or destroy an instance of a basic good.

To repeat, basic goods are aspects of human well-being, and nothing but such aspects. In themselves, as I have argued in my discussion of capital punishment, they give us always a reason to promote and protect, and always a reason not to damage. So an ethic of human goods, an ethic that takes human well-being as a touchstone notion, must establish some very strong protections of goods to be respected in human action, for damage to human goods is damage to human well-being or flourishing. An ethic that was concerned with human flourishing but paid no attention to whether an act was damaging or destructive of human goods would make little sense.

Yet it is impossible to go through life in service of human goods and human well-being without having some kind of negative impact upon basic human goods: even the choice to do this, rather than that, means that some goods will go unserved. In some cases, even fulfilling my obligations will have as a consequence some damage to basic goods: I thrust myself between my child and the attacker’s knife, for example, in order to save my child’s life; but I suffer grave damage to my own life in consequence. So a goods-based ethic rooted in human well-being cannot demand that whatever one does, one never in any way do anything that will bring harm upon instances of human goods. Such an ethic would be unworkable.

But one can always refrain from acting; and in this way, if in no other, one can always refrain from intentionally damaging instances of basic human goods. So we should conclude that the core constraint of ethics should and could be framed as a demand that one never intentionally damage or destroy an instance of a basic human good. This conclusion would only be strengthened were one to recognize that in many cases of positive action for the sake of some good, as in the case of my saving my child’s life, the unavoidable damage to the good—my life—is not intended. Rather, the harm I suffer is accepted as a side effect, but it is neither chosen as a means, nor willed as an end; in short, it is not intended.

This line of thought leads not only to the formulation of moral absolutes, but also to the so-called principle of double effect. With regard to absolutes, each will be framed as a negative requirement never to choose a particular kind of act that is always damaging to a basic good. So, a moral absolute regarding human life would be: never intentionally kill an innocent human being. (In fact, I believe that no human being should be intentionally killed, but we can put that aside for now.) 

However, recognizing that some acts that have as a consequence the death of a human being are such that the death is not intended, the principle of double effect teaches that under certain circumstances—if the agent has not been negligent and has no other way to address the problem, and if the goods at stake are great and gravely threatened—then the agent may do something (save my child’s life) that is morally good, even though that action has as a side effect a consequence (harm to my life) that it would be wrong to intend. Particularly where the good of human life is concerned, the principle of double effect has been thought central to the defense of moral absolutes; for example, without it—if we had only a blanket prohibition against doing anything that harmed innocent life—it would be impossible to refuse a medical treatment, no matter how onerous or costly, if the refusal would shorten the patient’s life.

What emerges from the discussion concerning moral absolutes, then, is this: First, moral absolutes are essential to the protection of human goods, and hence human well-being. They are not “mere” restrictions or commands, with no relevance to the goods that matter to us. 

Second, moral absolutes are to be understood as restricting certain kinds of intentional acts: intentional killing, for example. This leads, third, to the following important point: as so understood, moral absolutes are to be framed only by identifying a kind of act that, if it were chosen, would be such always as to involve the agent’s intending damage or destruction to a basic human good. Put another way, the acts picked out by moral absolutes do not themselves include a reference to their moral status; but they are such that they—acts of this kind—may be identified as always and everywhere wrong because of their negative relationship to human goods.

Descriptions of the moral absolute against murder thus go wrong if they identify the act that is prohibited as “unjust killing” or “killing one with a right to life.” Much better is: no intentional killing of innocent human beings. We may designate this kind of action by the name “murder.” And if, as I think, such acts as murder, so understood, are always directed against someone’s pursuit or enjoyment of basic goods, then one can conclude that the intentional killing of an innocent human being (murder) is always and everywhere wrong. Murder is thus not defined as wrongful killing (for then “murder is wrong” would be a mere tautology, trivially true). But, because all murder involves an intentional damaging of an instance of the basic good of human life, it is true that murder is always wrong.

There is, fourth and finally, an implication of the “absoluteness” of moral absolutes, an implication identified by every major figure of the Thomistic natural law tradition up until quite recently: absolutes are never to be violated, regardless of the consequences. This claim might seem almost comically obvious, were it not so routinely questioned, even by very serious proponents of the natural law, and even by members of faith traditions, such as the Catholic Church, who have accepted and promulgated the doctrine that there are moral absolutes. For routinely we find that even such persons of good will are doubtful that moral absolutes should be upheld in situations where many lives are at stake, or where horrible evils are threatened, or in situations, as they have come to be called, of “supreme emergency,” such as the Nazi threat against Europe, the Soviet threat against the free West, or the Islamist threat of al Qaeda.

As John Finnis and others have argued, even a conditional willingness to accept that moral absolutes may be put aside in such cases denudes the doctrine of moral absolutes of all its distinctive content: apparently, if such exceptions are to be contemplated, there will be situations in which the goods protected by the moral absolutes are outweighed or overridden by some conceivable set of harms or other achievable goods. But if such a possibility is available in principle, then not only are there no moral absolutes, there is also no reason to think that the boundary at which we meet restrictions against such actions as intentional killing of the innocent, false assertion, blasphemy, or adultery is far out, distant from our day-to-day considerations. Perhaps there are legitimate goods to be achieved and evils avoided, by, for example, killing a patient to relieve suffering, and not just killing non-combatants to destroy Nazi morale.

So the acceptance of the claim that there are moral absolutes makes a stringent demand on our practical reason: violation of such absolutes is never to be considered a real option for action, whether in hypothetical scenarios scared up to induce conditional violations, or in our day-to-day life, faced with the myriad of temptations to which each of us is subject.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Feser argues that the legitimacy of punishment requires the notion of merit, and that the idea of merit requires, in turn, that punishment must be proportionate to the crime. He believes that I implicitly deny what he calls the “principle of proportionality”—that punishment should be proportionate to the crime; I thus evacuate the idea of meriting punishment of any substance, and so implicitly deny the legitimacy of punishment, even while claiming not to—an alleged incoherence.

Feser does not address my account of punishment, which is thoroughly political in its foundations: punishment restores a kind of equality between citizens that the criminal’s overly self-assertive act(s) of will had disrupted, by taking away something of the criminal’s contrary to his will (such as his liberty of action).

Feser’s account of punishment does not appear to be rooted in political considerations, but in something, for want of a better word, more metaphysical: punishment is a harm that must be inflicted on criminals because they deserve it in some absolute sense. “Desert,” for Feser, seems to go beyond the idea, common to my account and his, that it would be wrong to punish those who were not responsible, to something stronger: punishment is the principled harming of someone, proportionate to the wrong that they have done others, because that is what they deserve. Feser makes reference to justice, but not in any overtly political sense: the justice served seems to be justice from the point of view of the universe, not of the state.

Consider, however, the sin of private blasphemy. On a plausible understanding, this could be considered the worst of possible sins, hence deserving of the greatest possible punishment. It is clear, nevertheless, on my account, why it is not to be punished by the state: it does not involve an over-assertion of the blasphemer’s will contrary to the order of wills established by law.

A political conception of retributive punishment makes somewhat softer claims about merit and proportionality than Feser does. Merit is, as I have noted, necessary in this sense: punishment should only be done to those who are guilty of the assertion of will that punishment redresses. Hence, if not deserved (merited), punishment should not be inflicted. Proportionality, too, is somewhat softened by contrast with Feser’s account. Feser supposes there is a precise, or specific, amount of punishment that is merited by the criminal and that ought, barring practical considerations and considerations of mercy, to be exacted. The cosmic scales are finely tuned.

But political scales—not so much. The degree to and way in which a criminal’s will ought to be restricted does not seem, even in principle, subject to such a fine-grained assessment; Aquinas thus considered punishment to be an example of what he called determinatio, determination of the law by decision. Such determinations are required by the natural law, for there must be a speed limit, or designated range of what is permissible. Yet the precise limit, in cases requiring a determination, is not fixed by the natural law but by choice, which can differ from place to place according to custom, prior commitment, or other considerations.

Of course, such determinations must be made within the scope of what is otherwise morally permissible, what the natural law requires; and if the natural law, as a matter of deduction, and not determination, requires that one never intentionally kill, then that choice is ruled out of the range of determinations one might make regarding punishment. This is a perfectly intelligible claim; one might, as Feser does, disagree with it, but the idea that it introduces an incoherence into my account of punishment is false.

I pressed on Feser the following argument to make the general point about the limits of punishment: just as I think intentional killing is not within the realm of permissible forms of punishment, so, I assumed, we both would accept that rape would not be within those bounds. Feser responds by dividing the wrongs of rape into those done to the victim—the wrongs of humiliation and sexual assault—and those done to the character of the rapist in and by his choosing: the “sexual perversion and sadism by which the rapist harms his own character.” By contrast, says Feser, to “take a life is, essentially, to inflict merely a single harm—the taking of the life.”

As an account of murder generally, however, this claim is also false. The murderer certainly deprives his victim of a good, and thus wrongs that victim; but the murderer also wills contrary to the good of life, and this willing is, like the choosing of sexual perversion and sadism, an intransitive harming of the murderer’s character. This can be seen in a number of ways: the attempted but unsuccessful murderer has not harmed his victim, but is morally guilty and corrupted in precisely the same way that the successful murderer is. Also, the one who accidentally kills has harmed the victim, but, in not choosing to do so, he is not guilty of an anti-life willing. His character is unchanged by the accidental death.

Here is a core aspect of my approach to ethics that seems to differ from Feser’s: I think that morality is ultimately a matter of the heart—of the will of the agent. What is the standard by which that agent’s will should be guided and measured? It is the standard provided by the various basic or fundamental goods of the human person, those goods that are constitutive aspects of every human person’s well-being and fulfillment, such as life, knowledge, or friendship. That standard, when reason considers all the goods, in their bearing on all beings who, like us, are fulfilled in those goods, is one of openness: agents should promote and protect as possible all the goods in all persons; and agents should never will contrary to the goodness of those human goods, by a choice deliberately to damage or destroy an instance of one of those goods in a person. Hence the claim on which I rest, ultimately, my opposition to capital punishment: the intentional killing of another human being is always impermissible.

The previous paragraph contains a number of points that Feser opposes in closing his essay. These points especially concern the concepts of dignity, goods, and persons, to which I now turn.

Dignity connotes an excellence, and the form of dignity that, in previous essays, I have named “essential dignity” is, I believe, the dignity or excellence of persons, of beings possessed, as Feser notes, of the joint capacity for reason and free choice. It is joint capacity, not as currently exercised, but possessed as a radical capacity by virtue of being a member of this human species, that makes a being a person and hence one of us, a member of the community of human persons to which each reader of this essay belongs.

This community is itself the community of beings whose fulfillment and well-being is to be found in the basic goods of human persons, goods that our capacities for freedom and reason enable us to pursue actively, if we have developed in the way that is characteristic but not inevitable for members of our species. To belong to that community is, therefore, to be protected by the scope of morality’s demand that we be open to the basic goods, and hence to be protected by morality’s requirement that we never intentionally damage or destroy an instance of a basic good: it is to be immune, among other things, from intentional killing.

Are the very freedom and reason that constitute us as members of the community protected by the scope of morality’s demands? Of course they are, because freedom and reason, in the sense that both Feser and I mean, are aspects of our life: to end either capacity is to end our existence as members of this species. So these capacities are to be absolutely protected against all intentional attacks.

But the exercise of freedom, particularly what Feser calls “liberty of action” is not identical to this capacity, and it can be limited without in any way damaging the capacity itself. Indeed, as I am sure Feser would agree, many forms of limitation on the freedom of action are, if only in the long run, enhancements of our ability to exercise that root capacity: such limitation is essential for proper education of children, for example.

So the limitation of liberty is very different from the intentional taking of life. The exercise of liberty, and the presence of a structured form of political freedom, are both instrumental, in a sense: they make possible our free self-constitution as persons of a certain character, and so, being instrumental, they can be limited. But the capacity itself is part of our life and, like the biological part of our life, ought never to be intentionally damaged or ended.

The notion of “dignity”—essential dignity—operates in a summary way to call all the preceding considerations about membership in the human community to mind; the undermining of the idea that this can be done, promoted by those who think of membership in the community as achieved, earned, or bestowed, has been one of the signal, if dismal, triumphs of the modern age. The “dignity” of the human being no longer carries presumptive weight against claims about the permissibility of a number of kinds of killing. This is quite at odds, however, with traditional natural law and specifically Christian thinking about this matter.

Considerations of human dignity seem to be at the root of much natural law and Christian reflection on the wrong of killing in such a way as to make the presumptive baseline position one of opposition to all killing. This presumptive baseline is only strengthened, in early Christianity, by reflection on the mystery of the Incarnation. In light of such considerations, the burden of proof, for those who accept the core idea that all human beings are persons and have essential dignity, is that intentional killing requires a special justification: these justifications typically run by reference to some special authorization to kill, divine or political, or to the loss of dignity suffered by the criminal.

It is only in the context of these considerations that appeals to desert and proportionality can and do get off the ground in the natural law tradition. These notions are not taken to be starting points, because the frame of reverence for human life is not understood in that tradition as already suffused with the relativity of circumstance that proportionality and merit import in a world in which everyone is guilty to some degree or other—particularly from a cosmic point of view. Rather, the presumptive starting point is one of absolute opposition to intentional killing of beings created in the image of God, for which exceptions must be earned.

But the traditional justifications for such exceptions seem to fail. A loss of essential dignity is tantamount to a loss of personhood—certainly not something experienced by the criminal—and the authority claims themselves seem too weak to justify intentional killing, if the criminal retains his essential dignity. Thus many full-fledged adherents to the natural law tradition and many religious, including magisterial, voices have moved continually closer to the claim that capital punishment is not just imprudent but in principle wrong.

Some believe that this position is incompatible with Catholic orthodoxy; Feser thinks the position is incoherent. I think the position is neither, and that it represents an important step in the struggle to acknowledge the worth of every human being, born or unborn, thriving or disabled, old or young, innocent or guilty.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Feser assumes that I am not against punishment as such, and this is correct. But in laying out this assumed ground of agreement, Feser articulates an account of punishment with which I disagree. Perhaps not surprisingly, we would both give the same name to our differing accounts of the essential purpose of punishment, namely “retribution.” Feser’s understanding of retribution is that a criminal deserves to have some harm inflicted upon him, and this is the purpose of punishment: to inflict that harm.

By contrast, I think that retributive punishment takes as its starting point an awareness that a political community is constituted by an ordering of the wills of the community’s members, an ordering that is shaped in accordance with the authoritative requirements of the law. This ordering requires, for the sake of the common good, various restrictions of the freedom that citizens might otherwise have, the freedom to do as they see fit. The ordering also requires, for the same common good, those restrictions demanded by the moral law on the freedom of persons to act maliciously against the good of others. By such an ordering and even disciplining of wills, citizens are provided a space in which they may safely, and in an effectively coordinated manner, pursue their well-being in community with others.

A criminal acts beyond the limits on wills so established: he takes more of the freedom that is mutually allotted to citizens than he has in fact been allotted. This is a wrong against the community, distinct from the wrong against any particular person that he might commit, such as the taking of another’s life or property. It is this wrong against the order of the community that the criminal law of the state endeavors to address through retributive punishment, by taking away from the criminal the ability to act as he pleases to a degree that restores, as much as possible, the imbalance that the criminal’s self-assertion created.

This account of punishment, about which much more could be said, does not converge with Feser’s claim that in punishment a criminal is intentionally harmed, at least not if that harm is understood as: intentional harm to a basic good or goods of the person. Rather, instrumental goods, especially liberty and money, are rightly targeted as part of the project of taking away freedom in proportion to the freedom that was unjustly exercised. The ensuing damage to an instrumental good might also have, and usually does have, as a side effect a negative impact on basic goods such as knowledge, friendship, or health. But by my account, it would be permissible to fine, to imprison, and perhaps to shame, but it would not be permissible, for example, to maim, to kill, or otherwise deliberately to attack a basic good in the person of the criminal.

Feser makes a principled argument for the permissibility of capital punishment, which he summarizes as follows: “But since a human being can deserve punishment, and a punishment ought to be proportional to the offense, it follows that he can deserve death if his offense is grave enough.”

Unlike Feser, I do not think this follows at all, for the underlying presupposition behind all just punishment is that the form of punishment in question is not an intrinsically wrong act. That is, not just the general practice of punishment, but the particular form of punishment, must be permissible in any given case.

Feser seems to lose sight of this point when he discusses punishments such as rape that are out of bounds, writing that “Sometimes inflicting such punishments would be impossible (a mass murderer cannot be executed multiple times), or would do more harm than good.” But neither of these is the reason rape is excluded as a legitimate form of punishment: rape is always and everywhere wrong, and is not available as an option for punishment, regardless of its feasibility or the proportion of goods to bads it might bring about.

As I argued in my earlier essay, I believe capital punishment falls into this category. As a basic, or intrinsic, human good, human life, just in itself, gives us only reasons for its pursuit, promotion, and protection, and no reason for its damage or destruction. By contrast, a merely instrumental good gives us no reasons for action in itself; yet reasons for action can be generated by one’s ends, either for the promotion or the intentional destruction of the instrumental good in question. So there is nothing intrinsically wrong with destroying money, or tools, or a house, if we have good reason to do so.

But what could justify the intentional destruction of a basic good, an intrinsic aspect of human well-being, such as human life? The idea that human beings have intrinsic dignity suggests that the answer is “nothing.” Perhaps human life could be intentionally destroyed if the evil of its destruction were outweighed by the good achieved. Yet such outweighing also seems ruled out for those who think that human life has a sacred or inviolable quality to it. And so the norm against intentional killing seems well-grounded.

I noted in my earlier piece that even if someone did deserve death, that did not mean that anyone had the authority intentionally to take life. Feser notes that I did not defend this claim; however, his own defense relies upon the question-begging argument just addressed: “But if the state has the authority to inflict punishment per se, and a punishment ought to be proportionate to the offense, then what reason can there be for denying that the state can also, in principle, legitimately inflict the death penalty for extremely grave offenses?” Only that the death penalty is, because intrinsically impermissible, off the table as a permissible form of punishment.

Still, Feser is right that the issue of authority is essential. It requires more discussion than I can undertake here, so I will confine myself to a few points.

As noted above, a reasonable account of political authority is that it is a practical necessity for securing the common good: absent political authority, and especially the authority of law, a community’s members will be unable to coordinate their actions, defend themselves adequately against malefactors, or provide for the needs of those weak members who are not otherwise being adequately cared for.

I do not see how the death of a human being, even of a criminal, can, just as such, be a part of any common good. While it can bring incidental benefits that might contribute to the common good, death itself cannot be part of that good, and so it does not appear to be within the authority of one publicly charged with the protection and promotion of a common good to seek death as such.

St. Thomas did not see things in this light. For in discussing capital punishment he wrote:

Now every part is directed to the whole, as imperfect to perfect, wherefore every part is naturally for the sake of the whole. For this reason we observe that if the health of the whole body demands the excision of a member, through its being decayed or infectious to the other members, it will be both praiseworthy and advantageous to have it cut away. Now every individual person is compared to the whole community, as part to whole. Therefore if a man be dangerous and infectious to the community, on account of some sin, it is praiseworthy and advantageous that he be killed in order to safeguard the common good, since “a little leaven corrupteth the whole lump” (1 Corinthians 5:6).

Central to Thomas’s argument here is the comparison between the citizen and the whole community, and an organ and the organism of which it is a part. Aquinas is certainly correct that the welfare of the organism takes precedence over that of its organs, and that accordingly diseased parts of the organism may be surgically removed. But as many commentators have noted, Aquinas goes wrong in his analogy, for citizens do not stand in relation to the state as organs do to organisms.

This can be seen in two ways. First, we should note that an organism is in an important metaphysical sense prior to its parts; the organism is responsible for the execution of its own self-directed growth and development, from which its organic parts emerge. Moreover, it is the organism’s existence that makes the parts to be what they are; hence Aristotle’s famous dictum that a severed hand is a hand in name only. But neither of these points is true of the relationship between a person and a state. Rather, persons are metaphysically prior to states: they have a real, non-derived existence, whereas there would be no states but for the existence of persons. Put another way, persons do, but states do not, have a life of their own.

And from the practical standpoint, there would be no need of the state save for the needs of persons. The state thus exists for the sake of persons, whereas organs exist for the sake of the organism of which they are parts. It seems to be a practical consequence of this that the state cannot sacrifice its members for the sake of the whole; thus, the analogy fails.

Aquinas limits the “disease” for which a part of the state can be killed to the commission of crimes. His reason for this is spelled out in the following important passage:

An individual man may be considered in two ways: first, in himself; secondly, in relation to something else. If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him. Nevertheless, as stated above (Article 2) the slaying of a sinner becomes lawful in relation to the common good, which is corrupted by sin. On the other hand the life of righteous men preserves and forwards the common good, since they are the chief part of the community. Therefore it is in no way lawful to slay the innocent.

Aquinas makes a crucial point in this passage, that he seems himself to overlook; drawing attention to it will serve to bring my discussion to a close. Note Aquinas’s first claim: “If we consider a man in himself, it is unlawful to kill any man, since in every man though he be sinful, we ought to love the nature which God has made, and which is destroyed by slaying him.” This claim presents as clear a statement of the Sanctity of Life and the Essential Dignity views as could be hoped for: it is unlawful to kill any man, considered “in himself.”

But what it is unlawful to do to a man in himself surely trumps any “accidental” consideration; perhaps it might seem lawful to kill a man secundum quid—in relation to something, whether a desired end, or status, or achievement, or the failings of the man in regard to these. Yet none of these can change the man’s nature, or the non-instrumental value of his life: considered in himself, it will, therefore, always remain wrong to kill him. This should be the final judgment of practical reason when brought to bear on the question of capital punishment.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. A second edition of Embryo: A Defense of Human Life, co-authored with Robert P. George, has just been published by the Witherspoon Institute. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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The sanctity of life view is often accompanied by a set of claims about human dignity, namely, that human beings possess essential, underived, or intrinsic dignity. That is, they possess dignity, or excellence, in virtue of the kind of being they are; and this essential dignity can be used summarily to express why it is impermissible, for example, intentionally to kill human beings: to do so is to act against their dignity.

This view—call it the Essential Dignity View—should be distinguished from a more deeply theological account of human dignity, which holds that our dignity comes from our origin in divine creation, and from our destination in eternal life with God. While defenders of the Essential Dignity View frequently assert these additional claims, they typically hold that human freedom and reason, even if well-described as rendering us “in the image of God,” can be understood and appreciated without reference to their divine origins.

The Essential Dignity View should also be distinguished from accounts of dignity according to which dignity depends upon some achievement or some bestowal of status by others. Many philosophers who use the language of “personhood,” for example, appropriate the language of dignity, and speak of the loss of human dignity when a human being, though remaining alive,  ceases to possess those properties upon which “personhood” is dependent. Similarly, one might think that dignity is a property dependent upon some form of social recognition; absent that recognition, a human being, such as a zygote, would not be “one of us.”  On both kinds of view, intentional killing of some human beings would not be incompatible with dignity, for those human beings would have no dignity. Such views arbitrarily designate some members of the human family as unworthy of moral respect despite the fact that they are beings of the same kind as ourselves.

By contrast, the Essential Dignity View identifies a much deeper connection between human nature and human dignity, and warrants the claim that all human beings have human dignity, regardless of age, achievement, degree of development, or social status. It thus is a perfectly adequate way of supporting the fundamental claim of respecting the sanctity of human life: no intentional killing of human beings.

However, even among the most important proponents of the natural law tradition, and the most important articulators of the notion of essential human dignity, this inference to the Essential Dignity View has not always been drawn. For according to some such thinkers, human dignity can be lost. Here, for example, is St. Thomas, describing just this loss of human dignity in order to justify intentional killing: “By sinning man departs from the order of reason, and consequently falls away from the dignity of his manhood, in so far as he is naturally free, and exists for himself, and he falls into the slavish state of the beasts, by being disposed of according as he is useful to others” (ST, II-II, Q. 64, a.2). Clearly, if taken literally, this claim would justify intentional killing.

A related objection to the Essential Dignity View, advocated by some in the natural law tradition, is that some human beings deserve to be killed. Although not much effort is made to distinguish this view from the view articulated by St. Thomas, there is this subtle difference, assuming that what Aquinas says is literally true: no beast genuinely deserves to die. If it were possible genuinely to alienate one’s dignity and fall into the state of the beasts, one would thereby take oneself out of the moral domain altogether; killing would not be a matter of desert, but only of, perhaps, prudence.

So I will treat the two views separately, in turn. Rebutting them does not serve, of course, to settle fully the morality of capital punishment, but it should serve to raise questions among social conservatives, including those who cheer the state of Texas’s distinguished record for executing criminals.

To begin with Aquinas’s view, it appears to border on incoherence: if “dignity” claims are intended to summarily capture certain truths about what it means to have a particular sort of nature, then one can lose one’s dignity, if one initially has it, only by losing one’s nature. But losing one’s nature just is ceasing to exist as the sort of thing one must be if one is to exist at all: it is to go out of existence altogether. This thought is impossible to sustain of a criminal who is the abiding subject of the drama of crime, investigation, apprehension, trial, conviction, and punishment, as even Aquinas’s language, which refers to “he” throughout, makes clear.

Moreover, the position seems unstable. If dignity can be lost or alienated through wrongdoing, whether through loss of nature or in some other way, why can it not also be lost by other means? That Aquinas’s view is dangerously proximate to the view according to which personhood can be lost is apparent in the work of Nigel Biggar. Biggar is no friend of those views that make personhood dependent upon achievement or status, but he resists the idea that those properties that give our life unique meaning and worth cannot be lost. Thus, he writes, of cases involving severe brain damage or unrelievable pain, that “it could be morally permissible to intend to take human life because, that life having lost its unique preciousness—its sacred value—the intention would not be malevolent.” Most natural law thinkers would resist this strenuously; their ability to do so is compromised, I believe, to the extent that they are committed to Aquinas’s view about criminals.

Finally, there are questions of gradation here. Not every crime is of equal gravity, but possession of a nature, or of essential dignity, is an all-or-nothing thing. What constitutes the dividing line between those crimes that, while wrong and degrading in some sense, are nevertheless insufficiently severe to cause us to fall to the level of the beasts, and those crimes that are so severe? It is difficult to imagine a principled account here.

Now let us turn to the second view and the question of desert. One could hold that some human beings—criminals guilty of extremely great wrongs—are still in possession of their nature as free and equal, and thus still subjects of essential dignity, yet hold that these human beings deserved death. Thus, intentional killing of these human beings would be permissible.

It is clear that the conclusion of this argument does not follow from the premise, even if we grant it. Perhaps some human beings do deserve death; that need not be enough to warrant the permissibility for anyone of killing that human being. It could well be that no human being has the authority to warrant intentional killing, even of the guilty.

Moreover, the ranks of those deserving death might be greater than many think. Looked at from a certain point of view, none of us is so without sin and wrongdoing on our conscience that we could guarantee our own immunity if desert were made the sole criterion for a right to life. And while as a legal matter, we in the West are inclined to think that life should only be taken for the taking of life, it is not obvious why this should be so. Does the adulterer really not deserve death if the murderer does? Again, it is not clear why not. Justifications that rest on the idea criminals deserve death are thus doubly problematic: there are difficulties both with the claim to authority, and with the boundaries of those who deserve to die.

Here, though, is the deepest reason to be opposed to capital punishment. From the practical perspective of an agent reflecting on those human goods that give point to human action and that underwrite possibilities of human flourishing, such as the goods of life, friendship, marriage, and personal integrity, we should recognize the following: each of the basic goods, in each of its possible instantiations, considered just in itself, only gives us reason for action, only is capable of motivating us for action on its behalf, and only is an aspect of genuine human well-being. Just in itself, action directly (intentionally) contrary to any human good makes no sense, is void of practical intelligibility. The same is also true of action against the life of even a seriously degenerate criminal. Insofar as he is a human being, his life gives us reason, and only gives us reason, for its protection and promotion.

It does not seem to me, then, that the Essential Dignity View should be accompanied by the claim that dignity can nevertheless be alienable or be overridden for those who deserve death; the Essential Dignity View and the sanctity of human life thus naturally go hand in hand.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a Visiting Fellow in the James Madison Program at Princeton University. He is the editor of Bioethics with Liberty and Justice: Themes in the Work of Joseph M. Boyle. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Many religious leaders and academics worried that the new healthcare regulations would inadequately address the conscience concerns of religiously affiliated healthcare institutions. The worries about conscience were well-founded. While the new regulations provide exemptions for religious healthcare institutions, those exemptions are exceedingly narrowly drawn, and only apply to those institutions that primarily employ and serve those who share the religious tenets of the institution. This requirement will, it seems, effectively rule out most religious healthcare facilities, which, after all, serve all comers, and not just co-religionists.

So, how should religiously affiliated institutions respond? They should, no doubt, continue to argue that the regulations violate freedom of conscience and attempt to expand relevant exemptions. But they must not overlook a more fundamental problem. By treating the provision of contraceptives as a necessary part of the political common good, these regulations create a political entitlement to contraceptives, a right that has never been part of our collective self-understanding as a nation.

The ground for claiming a political right to contraceptives and sterilization comes out of a more general idea underlying the recent attempt at reforming healthcare, which is this: it is reasonable to make affordable healthcare, including preventative care, a political entitlement for people who are unable to obtain it themselves. That idea strikes me as fundamentally correct. We can grasp that healthcare, broadly defined as access to medical interventions, drugs, and technologies, is essential to the preservation of life and bodily integrity, and proper organ functioning. Death, not far from those who are seriously diseased or disabled, brings an end to human existence and well-being—the focal points of health. And to be healthy enables one not only to thrive physically, but also to pursue all kinds of other opportunities. So health, and thus healthcare, is centrally important to human life.

If one recognizes the importance of healthcare for the sake of his own health, then he should also see its importance for the lives of all other human beings. Thus, our ties to other human beings, whether by kinship, nationality, or even physical proximity (think of “Good Samaritan” stories), put certain obligations on us to do what we can whenever these beings suffer urgent health-related needs. The first obligation of parents, for instance, is to care for their children’s health; and it is the obligation of neighbors and passersby everywhere to do what they can for those in urgent need.

But often, little can be done. In a world of expensive technologies that require special skill for their use, we can best meet our already existing obligations to other human beings through socially cooperative acts that distribute benefits, burdens, and obligations fairly and effectively. In some cases, the most efficient way to distribute these benefits, burdens, and obligations may be state involvement. If this is true, then in those cases, the state must take action.

Efficiency requires a concern for prevention: if small steps like vaccinations can stop future epidemics, then we should take those small steps. And if only the state’s help allows us to do this effectively, then the state should help. So, based on their efficiency, vaccination programs backed by state requirements could be preferable to programs asking only for voluntary compliance.

Now, wherever we judge that we have obligations to provide care and that the state’s assistance best helps us meet those obligations, then in some way, we have identified a right to healthcare – a human need of such gravity that others are obligated to come to provide aid. We have also begun to translate that right into a political right, an entitlement.

Yet we should be cautious in deciding to make a healthcare need into a healthcare right. To start this process of translation surely requires the following conditions:

• The identified need must be a genuine healthcare need.
• It must be a need of great gravity and urgency.
• It must be a need that requires the state’s participation in serving it.

Though these three requirements may not be the only preconditions for a healthcare need to become a healthcare right, if the state fails to meet any one of them, but asserts a healthcare right and sets up structures to serve that right, then the state either acts contrary to truth or acts outside of its authority, and thus unjustly.

The state would act contrary to truth if it smuggled into the general right to healthcare some non-health related benefits. In the case of contraception and sterilization, one can convincingly argue, first, that neither addresses an illness or a malfunctioning organ, and second, that the ability to become pregnant is in fact a sign of good health. So what disease is truly being prevented with these mandatory “preventative” care procedures?

The state would act outside its authority if the goods it sought were not goods that it is part of the state’s mandate to serve, or if the state’s involvement were not more efficient than the activity of citizens and their more local efforts at cooperation. The state simply has no mandate to be involved directly in the provision of every possible good to its citizens. In some cases, the good is, in some ways at least, in principle beyond the scope of the state: right religious worship, for example. In other cases, the state would be treating its citizens as children, doing for them what they were both obliged and able to do for themselves.

The HHS decision treats as a health care problem the social and moral problem of unwanted and unplanned pregnancy. And this is both a social and moral problem, it should be stressed: out of wedlock pregnancy is a widespread phenomenon, and is often devastating for the children so conceived, born, and raised. It is an injustice to them that their parents should be so reckless in their sexual choices. But injustice is not illness, and treating it as if it were is both untruthful, and dangerous, by addressing a moral problem as if it were subject to a technical fix.

Of course, the state is not simply looking to the serious social suffering that comes about from sexual irresponsibility; it is also looking to the benefits of free sexual activity without the threat of children, benefits widely desired by men and women throughout the West. Widespread availability, and now cost-free provision of contraceptives brings us one large step closer to a widely held goal of complete sexual liberation for men and women, a goal the achievement of which will be seen by many as a tremendous personal and social good.

Does achieving such a goal really fall under the authority and obligation of the state? Is the state, which exists to allow all of its citizens to pursue human well-being by assisting citizens where they are incapable of assisting themselves – by coordinating social action, by defending the nation against internal and external marauders, and by providing welfare benefits to those who would otherwise grapple with serious deficiencies to their well-being – is that state obligated to bring about the sexual revolution by requiring that all citizens, even those who would reject the sexual revolution as directly contrary to their understanding of human good, join together to treat that revolution as a funded political right?

That we even need to ask this question shows just how radical and far-reaching these new requirements are.

Many believe that when the pill was created in the twentieth century, its existence signaled that we were radically rethinking the goals of medicine; we turned away from concern for bodily health and towards something more focused on patient desires. These new requirements from the HHS threaten to usher in a similar change to our self-understanding as a nation.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His book Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry (Routledge, 2008) has just been released in paperback. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Advocates for life have formulated many well-known theoretical responses to these claims (some of which can be found in the book I co-authored with Robert P. George, Embryo: A Defense of Human Life). As these debates continue, it’s worth turning to another important source for our reflection on these claims: the experience of those who care for human beings who are in a persistent vegetative state, or are yet unborn. In an especially vivid form, the way we treat the radically dependent or disabled gives important testimony to our ability to situate these beings within a common framework of goods, a framework essential for thinking of these beings as persons united in a moral community with those of us who are, at least at the present moment, fully functioning.

The implications of the No Benefit view are immediately, coldly clear: if it is impossible to benefit someone, then it is also impossible to harm him by taking his life. Further, if someone becomes convinced that they cannot benefit their disabled child, or dependent grandparent, they have no reason to tend to or care for that person. Why, after all, should we take care of someone else, sometimes at great cost to ourselves, if our care can do no real good? Indeed, the No Benefit view goes naturally hand in hand with the denial of the human dignity of the unborn and the radically disabled.

Those who care for the radically dependent or disabled are motivated in part because they want to avoid a future in which their charges are ignored, abandoned, mocked, or starved. Rightly, they recognize all these possibilities as bad for their charges. Instead, they attempt to preserve the patient’s life in a loving way, in an attractive environment, surrounded by loved ones, in an atmosphere of at least some joy, laughter, and music. Even if their charge has no active ability to reason, the caregiver still recognizes the attractiveness of this possible future, and the possibility that it is a real benefit not only to the caregiver, but also to their loved one.

This insight about the good is justified by the earlier thought about what would be bad for the loved one. If it is bad, say, to mock a permanently unconscious patient by dressing him as a clown, or using him as a door stop (and few would deny this), then it would therefore be good to pursue the very same goods—treatment with respect and solidarity—that those bad forms of treatment would destroy.

Similarly, pregnant mothers can readily imagine a situation in which their unborn children are unloved, unprepared for, and done violence to; and in all such cases, they can recognize a deficiency of goods for the child, not just for themselves. The active ability to exercise the powers of reason on the part of the unborn again does not seem necessary to act for a shared good in the person of that child. Even the horrific reason that is sometimes given to justify abortion, that it is for the good of the unborn child, shows at least this ability to recognize possibilities as good and bad for the unborn, even if there is terrible error as to which possibilities are good, which bad.

But isn’t the treatment of the unborn in this case entirely anticipatory? According to this objection, the goods sought are not goods now for them, but only will be goods for them later. The problem with this view is that it fails to explain the actions of mothers (and fathers) who care for their in-utero child in a loving way even when they know that their child will die shortly before or shortly after birth. Moreover, many parents identify a time in utero, perhaps even the moment they first heard they were expecting, as the real beginning of their relationship to their child.

By contrast, consider a more obviously anticipatory case. Suppose that right now I do not have friends, but am preparing in various ways for the possibility—moving to a more populated place, working on my personal grooming, and developing virtuous habits. These preparations are truly only anticipatory: they do not themselves begin any friendship, and when I do make friends, I will date the beginning of that good in my life from the time of the friend’s first presence, not the time of what was done in advance.

No Benefit theorists are also likely to argue that person-oriented treatment of the radically impaired at the end of life is entirely symbolic. What is performed is done only in recollection of a person who was once present, but is no longer; at the extreme, such theorists could hold that there is even a form of disrespect involved in treating what is no longer a person as if it still were one. And whereas many people see themselves as benefiting by maintaining solidarity and commitments to a permanently unconscious patient, such as a spouse or parent, a No Benefit theorist might think this benefit entirely illusory.

But adult children, siblings, and spouses often see themselves as maintaining a previously existing relationship with a patient, not simply honoring, in a symbolic way, a relationship that has in fact ended. Putting flowers on a gravestone is likely to be seen as a symbolic act done in remembrance; but bringing flowers, perhaps of a favorite kind, to the room of one’s permanently unconscious spouse is likely to be seen as a loving, not a remembering, act. Similarly, feeding a patient in a persistent vegetative state appears to be one thing, while leaving a piece of cake on the grave of a deceased loved one is something altogether different. And spouses who maintain fidelity to their unconscious loved ones are true to the goods of a marriage that continues to exist.

Our very practices thus reveal the implausibility of the claim that we are unable to benefit—and therefore also to harm—those not yet, or no longer capable of, acting for themselves. Yet the No Benefit view does highlight the reality that human beings, and their pursuit of human goods, have an important temporal aspect to them.

At a most general level, we are beings who live in time, who go through temporal phases of development and decay, and who are not, at various points, actively able to do all that we one day will, or one day did. Recognition of this is essential, or we are likely to think that a snapshot image of a human being will tell us everything about what that being is. Yet it is absurd to think that a snapshot of, for example, an infant tells us everything about that child’s capabilities or goods, in abstraction from how human beings typically develop through time. Indeed, to treat a child in accordance with such a snapshot idea would require that we abandon practices that make no sense from that perspective, such as talking to children who do not yet understand what is being said; yet these practices contribute in essential ways to the development of our children’s capacities.

Looking backwards, an understanding of how a particular human being has lived through time is essential to understanding the way in which certain goods will, and will not, be of benefit now for that person. In the context of established relationships with others, how a good must be pursued in order to fully benefit another takes a specific shape: given the contours of a marriage over time, for example, husbands typically know that certain gifts will please, and certain forms of respect will be appreciated by, their wives, while other forms, acceptable for a different couple, would be experienced as strange and alienating.

This temporally specific quality to the pursuit of goods with and for another suggests that our treatment of those who have lived among us, but are now radically impaired, should be affected by the shape of those previously existing relationships. The way of life lived by a person now in a persistent vegetative state—a life that typically will have been lived with others, within a certain family-specific “culture”—might have consequences for the forms of good his caregivers should now pursue for him. Why, for example, would family members play music of a form detested by the patient in his presence, or decorate his hospital ward in a way known to be disliked?

On the other hand, particular ways of showing affection, developed through time with the patient, might still be especially appropriate even when the patient cannot actively respond to those gestures. A family-specific way of life, for example—styles of dress and decoration, forms of communication, jokes, religious symbols, and the like—should perhaps be extended as much as possible into the life of a no-longer conscious patient. Thus parents of a PVS child will hope to bring friends to visit, and to take meals, celebrate holidays, and pray together in the presence of their unconscious child, and even, if possible, to care for the child in the home. If this suggestion is correct, then the form that the general good of sociality and solidarity should take would thus be specified by the patient’s and the family’s past.

We must be able to situate human beings in their presently existing condition, and to situate their present opportunities for goods, into a larger temporal frame that includes their past and future. This is essential if we are to recognize that those human beings are a part of our human community, and that they can, like more active members of that community, be really benefited and really harmed by our choices. And these abilities are evidenced by our lived experience, and, in particular, by the practice of parents, husbands, wives, children, and friends who realize, in the lives of their charges, the goods of life, play, beauty, justice, and solidarity from conception to natural death.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His book Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry (Routledge, 2008) has just been released in paperback. Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Kozinski argues that the proper resolution of this tension requires “more than what unaided, human moral experience and purely philosophical speculation…can provide.” He thus turns to Trinitarian reflections of God as a self-giver, and creation as gift, to show that our ultimate obligation is, in fact, to desire happiness for its own sake, “because that is precisely the way we justly show our gratitude for the good gift we have been given.”

We could describe this approach to the key moral concepts of good and ought as “top down.” While Kozinski thinks that there is a role for philosophical explanations of the experience of ought, he holds that none that has been put forth is adequate in the way the theological account is. So theology is the starting point for our understanding of the phenomenon both of obligation and of our orientation towards goods and the good. It appears that in the absence of the theological account, our ordinary moral notions will be ungrounded, perhaps to the point of seeming like merely arbitrary projections.

The task of understanding our moral concepts and judgments, and of providing an adequate and critically reflective account of them, is indeed essential. As Robert P. George and I wrote in Embryo, ethical theory “seeks to identify principles of right action. By the identification of such principles, moral agents are guided in their deliberation about what they may do, must do, and must refrain from doing.” In the absence of such articulated and defended principles, however, and in the absence of a common cultural and religious framework undergirding a shared set of mores, once widely held principles such as the sanctity of human life or the norm against lying become held without conviction or abandoned entirely. So the stakes are high in thinking about the foundations of morality.

For this and other reasons, Kozinski’s starting point seems mistaken. In terms of what is likely to make sense of moral norms to a secular and suspicious culture, appeal to a Trinitarian theology, though, I believe, permissible in the public square, will probably be found wanting. Pragmatically, it violates Aquinas’ dictum that “if you are disputing with people who accept no authority, you must resort to natural reason.”

Moreover, natural reason seems prior to the sort of Trinitarian reflections put forth by Kozinski, even by his own standards: he writes of our duty to respond to God’s gift to us with love and gratitude, and this is surely correct. Yet this presupposes an awareness of love and gratitude as the appropriately obligatory response to the phenomena of gifts and giving. And indeed, even faith itself seems possible only to those who are aware prior to the act of faith of the obligation to believe. So some moral truths are available to us, and can be properly understood and defended, in the absence of a well-worked out Trinitarianism.

Where does reflection on such moral truths begin? Not, I think, with the experience of obligation, but with our practical apprehension of goods, of aspects of human wellbeing whose desirability makes action possible. This leads to two other realizations: First, that such goods as we recognize as perfective of us are likewise perfective of others like us. Second, that such goods are multiple in nature, and not able to be pursued, by any of us, in an all-encompassing way. Choices are thus necessary between good options, and it is in thinking reasonably through our choices about goods that we experience the phenomenon to which Kozinski points, that of obligation.

To see this more clearly, we must note again the multiplicity of goods: we are perfected by life and health, but also by knowledge; by friendship and marriage, but also by play and aesthetic experience. These goods, and others such as personal integrity and, in a sense to be explained shortly, religion, are recognized as promising benefits that may be pursued in action. But not all goods and all benefits may be pursued in their entirety: we are limited beings, and thus we find ourselves with mutually exclusive options for choice—to pursue this course of action for the sake of our health, or that for the sake of our friend, where choosing the one means giving up on the other. Such choices should not be made randomly; they require a standard, a standard by which it will be possible to determine what we ought to do.

This standard is not to be found in the comparative goodness of the goods; if options could be so determined, there would be no free choices, for the option promising less good would cease to be a real option. But such choices can be governed either by reason or by feelings. The problem with feelings is that they are notoriously partial in many ways: to the good here and now, to the good for me rather than for you, to the good that appeals to what I want rather than to what I have made a commitment to or to what is a more genuine realization of a good.

In all these ways desire can fetter reason and turn us from a directedness and openness to the goods themselves. The standard for moral choices is thus: complete or integral openness to all the goods in all persons. Reflection on this standard makes moral norms clear, both theoretically and practically. For example, a choice directly against a basic good cannot ever be reasonable, for it is not fully open to the good chosen against. And so, the reasonable agent recognizes that it is always wrong to intentionally kill another human being.

I noted earlier that among the goods that are fundamentally perfective of human persons is the good of religion. Should religion not, then, be considered the highest good? No, it should not: A proper relationship to whatever more-than-human source of meaning and value exists is a perfection that human beings should seek—we are better off for being in that relationship. But it is one perfection among many, different in its goodness from the perfection that is constituted by a just ordering of our social relations, or the mutual and comprehensive sharing of lives of spouses open in their marital acts to the procreation of children.

While the good of religion is not the only or highest good, reflection leads us to recognize it as the most architectonic. For if the more-than-human source of meaning is our creator and causal sustainer, then all that we do in pursuit of human goods and human flourishing is done with that being’s cooperation. That being sustains us and our acts, and also is responsible for our creation as beings of this nature, with goods of these sorts, and with a reason by which we may know and a will by which we may choose these goods. Such a being apparently has our good in mind in creating us, and an appropriate response to this truth is to be rightly ordered to this being, in everything that we do, by attitudes and emotions of cooperation and gratitude towards that being. In other words, in every choice that we make, we should see ourselves also as pursuing the good of religion, the good of being in the right relationship to the greater-than-human source of everything.

Moreover, it is reasonable to expect that such a creating and sustaining being is personal in some way, and thus to expect that this being has revealed itself to us. Should that expectation turn out to be vindicated, then what that revelation tells us about that creator, and about ourselves, will provide important aids to our understanding both of human goods and of what reasonableness requires in choosing among such goods. Should that revelation tell us that this being’s nature is love, we will understand all the more our obligation to pursue goods for others in a self-giving manner. Should that revelation tell us that this being’s nature is also truth, then we will refuse to be conformed to a world in which truth may be sacrificed for some “greater” good.

The reflections I have here offered, brief and certainly far from exhaustive, are nevertheless an example of a more “bottom up” approach than that taken by Kozinski. Like Kozinski, I think that good and ought are ultimately reconcilable, for ought emerges from the requirements of reason in pursuing a multitude of goods. And like Kozinski, I think that our pursuit of those goods should be modeled on what we can learn of the life and nature of the being who has made all these goods available to us. But the former of these insights genuinely comes first, and is available to natural reason, both in the course of our personal deliberations, and in arguments in the public square about, inter alia, the sanctity of life, justice and injustice in war, the nature of marriage, and even the importance of religion itself in a culture and polity. The requirements of natural reason in the pursuit of goods—which requirements have been known for centuries as the natural law—provide a more adequate starting point for the work of moral reflection than the sorts of theological and ultimately Trinitarian considerations in which moral reflection should come to its fruition.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Second, it seems clear to most that Jones did not himself kill any innocent persons, nor did he, strictly speaking, cause the rioters to kill anyone. Those rioters are responsible moral agents, and there is something demeaning in the suggestion that the behavior of Jones is at the root of their actions; such a thought borders on an accusation of moral immaturity. It appears that justice requires that the rioters be treated as fully responsible for what they did.

So, to repeat, there is a strong tendency to separate the two wrongs—the burning of the Koran and the lethal rioting. When, recently, Senator Lindsay Graham expressed a wish to hold Jones “accountable,” this was quickly interpreted as a weak and foolish assertion of moral equivalency and/or responsibility. Yet, at least from a moral standpoint, Graham’s desire for accountability is quite justifiable: Jones is, I shall argue, guilty of much more than simply an offense against a particular religion. Rather, he is guilty of a degree of recklessness that is morally criminal.

To see this, we need to recognize that the rioters’ actions were either intended by Jones—that is, he burned the Koran precisely in order to induce Muslims abroad to act irresponsibly—or the rioters’ actions were foreseeable side effects of Jones’ deed. In neither case, of course, were the rioters’ deeds caused by Jones’ actions, but in neither case is this necessary.

Take the first option, that Jones intended these lethal reactions. We frequently intend to achieve a goal by relying on the expected actions and reactions of others. My intention to have flowers delivered to my wife in the hospital depends, for its success, on deliberate cooperation from some other agents, but also on some actions that are not cooperative but merely predictable, such as the willingness of hospital staff to provide room information to the flower company. It does not appear to be impossible that Pastor Jones engaged in the burning of the Koran precisely because he intended—in a surely delusional way—to provoke a civilizational conflict between the Christian and Islamic “worlds.” If so, then Jones’ intention was, in fact, homicidal: he intended to provoke those whom he could to murderous violence, and in so doing, he shared their murderous intention. If so, Jones is himself morally guilty of murder, even if such a charge is impossible to sustain legally.

More plausible is the second option, that Jones merely foresaw that there would likely be lethal consequences of his actions. That such consequences were foreseen is very likely, since US officials had repeatedly warned Jones of this possibility. Jones had, on this more charitable interpretation, the intention of making a statement of some sort about the moral failings of Islam, and he made this statement by a public burning of the Koran, foreseeing that there was a real risk of death for some unspecified persons around the world.

Does the lack of a causal relationship between Jones’ actions and those effects mean that the riots and deaths were not side effects, willingly risked, of his deeds? It does not. We do, of course, include among the foreseen side effects of an action causal consequences: when I go jogging, the wear and tear on my sneakers is caused by my run, though it is not intended.

But not all side effects are caused. Consider the actions of a teacher giving just grades to her students. She foresees various reactions: joy, anger, resentment. And she can sometimes foresee actions arising from these emotions: she foresees that Smith will give up at this point and fail the class; that Jones will renew his visits to her office, cutting into her time with other students; and that Robinson will complain to the Chair, thus setting in motion a painful set of meetings and deliberations about how to respond. Yet she does not, strictly speaking, cause any of these effects.

Is our teacher morally responsible for these negative side effects? More accurately, is her acceptance of these side effects morally wrong? In most cases, we would say no. But what is crucial here is the justice of our teacher’s actions. She is carrying out her appropriate responsibilities, doing what she must in accordance with her professional role and her upright commitments. Under such circumstances, we think that the demands of her role justify the acceptance of a certain amount of negative side effects (although, in some cases, she might have additional responsibilities to alleviate, where possible, such side effects).

In some cases, our judgment is even more strongly in favor of the acceptance of bad side effects. Historically, the effect of refusing to deny one’s faith in the face of lethal threats has been death, to oneself and one’s family. Yet many religious believers have thought it absolutely impermissible to ever deny their faith. They thus willingly accepted lethal side effects to themselves and others, and seem to have been entirely justified in doing so: no amount of bad consequences is such that it “outweighs” the wrong of deliberately foreswearing one’s religion.

So in two cases, accepting bad side effects is, or can be, permissible: when the alternative is the violation of an absolute moral norm, and when the alternative is failure to perform an action one rightly takes to be obligatory.

By contrast, the foreseeable negative side effects of morally wrong acts are not only never morally acceptable; there is a strong sense that an agent who accepts such side effects accepts responsibility for those side effects in deliberately performing the morally wrong act. The agent who intends his bomb to terrorize but not to kill nevertheless is held responsible for “accidental” deaths that were foreseen as possible and accepted.

We should grant, for the sake of charity, that Pastor Jones is ignorant of the fact that, objectively, his actions in burning the Koran were morally offensive and wrong. To deliberately offend against the tenets of a religion is usually wrong, absent some overwhelming justification; to do so by committing sacrilege is generally gravely wrong.

Pastor Jones no doubt disagrees. Yet he clearly did not think that burning the Koran was obligatory, nor that failure to burn it would have violated an absolute obligation. This is clear by the history of events leading up to the burning, in which Jones threatened to burn, decided against burning, and then once more changed his mind. It is further confirmed by the appearance that Jones acted as he did primarily as a form of symbolic expression—he certainly did not think that he was bringing some form of cosmic justice to Islam by declaring it guilty of crimes against humanity.

On the best possible interpretation, then, Jones believed that what he was doing was permissible in itself, but optional—something that, absent all other considerations, would have some expressive value, but not something that he was compelled to do by his role or responsibilities. Yet Jones judged further, against the known risk that Islamic anger would lead to deadly consequences, that the lives of any innocent strangers lost as a consequence of such anger were proportionate to the good he would gain by his actions. That is, he judged it reasonable to accept any lives that might be lost as collateral damage to his goal of expressing forceful condemnation of Islam.

Such a judgment is appalling. The UN workers who were killed as a result of the Afghan riots were innocent in every way, and indeed were working to bring about peace in a troubled region, at risk and cost to themselves. It was a violation of the kind of fairness invoked by the Golden Rule for Jones to privilege his own desire to express himself above the safety of innocent human beings abroad, assuming, as I have argued, that the danger to those innocents was foreseeable as a risked side effect of Jones’ actions.

Such side effects were foreseeable and extremely grave, yet Jones did not reck them; his actions were reckless, and lethally so. And in consequence, while he did not cause the deaths of those innocents, and while his own culpability does not mitigate the responsibility of those who did cause those deaths, he bears a not insignificant moral responsibility for those deaths.

Senator Graham is, I believe, absolutely right to wish that there were some way for Jones to be held accountable. There appears not to be, legally, however, and perhaps this is for the best: upholding and applying a law that forbade the burning of holy books might be overly intrusive, and might be in tension with constitutionally protected rights. But Jones should not be allowed to hide behind his right to free speech to shield him from moral blame, nor should he be allowed to hide behind the only apparent gap in gravity between what he did, and what was done by the rioters. Willingly to accept the risk of such great damage to innocent human life for such a meaningless bit of self-expression is a morally grave wrong, even if it is not the wrong of intentionally killing the innocent.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The principle that I have defended is this: false assertion (that is, assertion contrary to one’s mind) is always wrong. My claim is not that assertion of what is, unbeknownst to one, false is always wrong, nor that speaking words one knows to be false is always wrong; people sometimes speak erroneously without asserting contrary to their own mind, and, as I discuss below, people speak untruths without making assertions in various contexts. Moreover, one can “assert falsely” in my sense while actually saying something true, if what one believes is false.

In this essay, I address a criticism that can be formulated in two ways. Some of my critics hold that all false assertions are lies, but that some lies are not wrong. Others hold that all lies are wrong, but that only some false assertions—unjustified ones—are lies. Both types of critics hold that false assertion is not always wrong, a view that I reject. For reasons that will emerge, I think that all false assertions should be understood as lies, and that all lies, so understood, are wrong.

The claim that lying so understood is always wrong has been met with disbelief for many reasons, but among them is the simple fact, to which Professor Arkes draws our attention, that lying seems an essential part of our public life. Few would doubt that keeping secrets and engaging in subtle diplomacy regularly shades over into lying, or that journalistic, law enforcement, or espionage work often utilize lies. It would seem impossible for a polity to get along without them.

The appeal to practical impossibility in this, as in other, contexts should be resisted. Many people participating in this discussion would scoff at the notion that absolute prohibitions on, say, sex outside of marriage or the deliberate killing of the innocent are impossible for us to live out and thus not really binding. And so to see these same people nevertheless employ similar claims about an absolute prohibition on lying has been rather discouraging.

Likewise, appeals to what is “obvious,” to intuition, to experience, to the common sense of the many, and also to the tyranny of abstract principles should be resisted here, at least by those who, for example, resist these very same appeals in debates over the morality of contraception or abortion, where such appeals are regularly made in favor of such practices.

Finally, the temptation to simply refuse argument and self-scrutiny should also be resisted. It has been dismaying to see many pro-lifers deny that there is any reason to consider the possibility that some means in service of the pro-life cause might be impermissible. Some have suggested that the critics of lying in service of life are engaged in sabotage of the pro-life movement, or that they are hopeless academics who have not contributed to the real fight, or, and I quote, that they should just “SHUT UP!!!” and honor all those making a real contribution.

For any movement for justice to refuse to engage in criticism from within is for that movement to risk moral bankruptcy. Moral integrity can be maintained only by always being willing to subject one’s own actions, as those of others, to moral appraisal of the most exacting sort. Righteousness is not to be achieved by self-righteous indignation (a claim I recall the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus making), but by right-mindedly struggling to ensure that one’s every deed and word is above reproach.

Nevertheless, there are real argumentative challenges that require response, and I will endeavor to do several of them some justice here.

Only “Unjustified” False Assertion?

The first challenge has to do with the nature of moral absolutes, such as the absolute norm against murder, or, as I believe, the absolute norm against lying. Hadley Arkes and Francis Beckwith, while seeming to agree that these are moral absolutes, have both argued that absolute norms such as these contain within them a moral qualifier. The prohibition on murder is a prohibition on unjustified killing. Likewise, the prohibition on lying is on unjustified false assertion.

Yet no critic, speaking from the Catholic intellectual or faith tradition, has drawn the obvious conclusion from this that therefore the (absolute) norm regarding adultery is a norm against unjustified extramarital congress; or that the (absolute) norm against contraception is a norm against unjustified prevention of conception. And this is hardly surprising, for it is widely recognized that this is not, in fact, the nature of these norms.

As John Paul II labored to explain, there are acts which, independently of their further ends, or of their circumstances, are wrong precisely in virtue of the object chosen. That object—the form of behavior settled upon by the agent—is incompatible with the human good, including the human being’s ultimate orientation to God. Choices of these sorts are wrong everywhere and always. Their objects are designated “intrinsically evil” precisely to indicate that their moral character can be recognized by considering only the object of the act itself (other questions, concerning the gravity of any particular violation, for example, will require attention to ends and circumstances).

One does not, therefore, look to whether extramarital intercourse is being performed at the right time, with the right person, in the right way, or with a view to some good end (perhaps an abortionist will give up his trade if a married woman were willing to be his mistress, thus saving the lives of many unborn in the area). Rather, one recognizes that the choice of such intercourse is incompatible with the human good because of its violation of the good of marriage, full stop. In asserting that adultery is always and everywhere impermissible, then, the tradition does not hold that adultery is “unjustified extramarital intercourse,” but that it is simply extramarital intercourse as such.

Now I identified two aspects of the human good that I believe to be inevitably damaged in the precise choice to assert a falsehood in order to deceive. If that description picks out an intelligible object of human choice (the sort of behavior that a human being can choose to engage in) and if that chosen action always directly damages the goods of integrity (by deliberately dividing the unity between inner and outer self) and community (by thwarting the revelation of person to person that is the foundation of all forms of community), then there is an absolute moral norm prohibiting lying. And the object of its prohibition (false assertion with intent to deceive) is not itself already described with the moral qualifier “unjustified.”

I argued further that no “greater good” than integrity or community is available by reference to which one could judge it right to damage one good for the sake of another. I have seen no criticisms of my view thus far that engaged with these claims directly, save only those that suggest that it is obvious that one is not unloving to the murderer at one’s door when one lies to him.

Now I do not think that one is necessarily unjust to the murderer (or the Nazi, on whom more below) in lying. He is not owed the truth. But while moral absolutes of the sort I am discussing (not just that concerning lying, but also concerning intentional killing, adultery, and others) typically overlap considerably with demands of justice, they rarely, if ever, are exhausted by such concerns.

Consider the moral absolute against intentional killing of the innocent. Typically, adherence to this norm protects the common good—an injustice is done to those who are killed, usually against their will, and so the protection of human life against such acts of injustice falls to the state as among its primary tasks (which, at their most general, can be described precisely as the promotion of justice and peace).

But, surprising though it may seem, not all cases of intentional killing are cases of injustice. While self-killing (suicide), for example, is often against the common good, it is not contrary to the will of the victim, and some cases can be imagined in which it is not contrary to the common good either. Imagine a man trapped on a deserted island, losing hope, and perhaps in pain. He does no injustice, I suggest, by killing himself (leaving aside his relation to God, which is not here relevant). Nevertheless, such a man violates the absolute norm against intentionally killing the innocent: its demands are not simply those of justice but rather demands of the human good as such (of which the demands of justice are but one part). Similarly, one can now imagine on the deserted island two married couples, past child-rearing age, who decide to live sexually as a foursome. No one’s will is thwarted, and the common good does not seem here especially jeopardized; yet the norm against adultery applies in full force.

In this context, it is worth resisting a comparison suggested by Professor Arkes between the norm against lying, and the norm against stealing. The latter norm has always been understood to be unlike the norms against killing, adultery, and lying, in that it is entirely dependent upon the relationship between property and the common good; that is, the norm against stealing is entirely in service of justice. And the just, as we know, is dependent in many ways on circumstances and further intentions. To return a borrowed firearm to a neighbor is not to be done in the circumstance that the neighbor is in a homicidal rage. Justice, which usually requires returning a neighbor’s property, here requires the opposite. And because the goods of the world are, in a deep sense, for the benefit of all, and not just the benefit of those who, for now, have authority over them, it has been considered in the tradition right for a starving man to take the bread of another (provided this other is in no danger) to feed himself and his family. Thus the “absolute” norm against stealing really is a norm against “unjustified taking/holding of another’s property,” and “unjustified” in this context refers to the contextualized and circumstantial demands of justice. But, as I have argued, the norm against lying, while usually in service of justice, is not only about justice, and thus such exceptions are not built, as it were, into the norm’s mandate.

In sum: if there is genuinely an absolute norm against lying, as most commentators recognize is strongly suggested by a perusal of the authoritative sources, then that norm does not prohibit unjustified false assertion, but false assertion full stop. False assertion, which is what lying is, like intentional killing of the innocent (murder), intentional foreswearing of one’s faith, or intentional extramarital intercourse (adultery), is, on this view, simply never to be done.

Deceiving Without Lying and Partial Truths

Yet two sorts of cases still provoke. One is the willingness of defenders of the traditional view, such as Aquinas, to identify actions and speech that might look like lies as not in fact lies. Thus, Aquinas does not think that military feints are lies, and others deny that common courtesies such as “I’m doing well, thank you,” or “That was a lovely meal” are lies even when not strictly true. For some, these cases threaten the boundaries of the definition of lying in problematic ways.

It is impossible to deal adequately here with all the disputed cases. Yet I would note that the case that generated this discussion in the first place does not seem reasonably disputed as a boundary case of this sort. There are reasonable questions over whether Live Actions’ false assertions were justified; but not really over whether they made the sorts of false assertions that are on my account to be considered lies. Nevertheless, some comments are in order.

First, it is essential to the definition of a lie that it be an assertion contrary to one’s mind. But, while one can assert through one’s actions, this is not usually the case, even though one knows that one’s actions are often taken as providing evidence for some further belief. Consider the action of leaving one’s lights on. This could be an assertion—“one if by land, two if by sea!”—but it is not usually. Yet turning one’s lights off can be taken by miscreants to indicate that one is not home, and one might reasonably take steps to prevent that harmful inference by leaving one’s lights on. Some examples of actions that are not lies seem to be like this: they do not assert, but only conceal what might be taken as evidence, and perhaps lead to the drawing of false conclusions.

In other contexts, whether involving action or speech, there is no assertion because, within certain limits, it is assumed by all participants that there will be no asserting. Under ordinary circumstances, the actor who says “The building is on fire” in a play is not asserting falsely, because he is not asserting at all. But if he were to stop the play, address the audience, and shout urgently, while pointing, “The building is on fire!” he would indeed be lying if the building were safe. Some misleading actions and speech in wartime seem to be akin to the theater: all participants know that, except in certain understood circumstances, assertion is just not on. But communications to the enemy requesting truce or suggesting terms are understood to return combatants to a truth-speaking context, and would be disgraceful if dishonest.

There are, further, contexts in which less information is given than would be necessary for some agent to accurately know what was going on. Gerard Bradley has argued, I think persuasively, that “buy and bust” police actions, or the transmission of information by a young man who hangs around a gang, need not involve lying. And the blogger Jennifer Fitz has provided a “quick tutorial” on how not to lie to someone who is not owed the truth that is brief but helpful. Argument at the margins of some of these cases is inevitable, but one should not mistake disagreement at the margins as a sign that the core of the view is in trouble.

The Nazi at the Door

Yet perhaps the most frequently mentioned objection is taken by many to be such that it alone could destroy the entire view that lying is always wrong. And this is the case—not, alas, unknown in history—of the Nazi at the door. Professor Arkes is just one of many who cite the good citizens of Amsterdam who hid Jews from Nazis, and, in some cases at least, lied to those Nazis bent on discovering them.

On my view, it is wrong to lie to the Nazis. But let us start with what this view does not say. It does not say that the lies of the Amsterdam citizens deserved punishment, that their moral gravity was even remotely similar that of the Nazis’ crimes, or that these citizens were, as a result, wicked or evil people (many, as noted by Brandon Watson, were heroes). Yet each of these claims has been attributed to defenders of the absolutist view with no textual evidence that I can find.

Nor does the claim about the wrong of lying identify what the Amsterdam citizens should do or say. In a distressing passage, Professor Arkes asks whether I am “earnestly saying then that householders speaking to the Gestapo at the door are obliged to refrain from speaking untruthfully, for they do not directly intend the consequences of turning in the Jews they are hiding?” Similarly, John Zmirak, at Inside Catholic writes:

Do we really believe that almighty God wants us to save the innocent only when we can be clever enough to craft a “mental reservation” that deceives a murderous robber or SS trooper, without stating something that is literally untrue? If we’re too surprised or stupid to concoct a really fabulous piece of misdirection, then should we be content that the innocent in our care must go to the gas chambers?

But neither Arkes’ nor Zmirak’s suggestions are any part of my view. I have nowhere suggested, and I would firmly deny, that one has an obligation to turn the Jews in. Nor do I think one should try to save them through crafty “mental reservations,” or be “content” when they are led away to the gas chambers. The view I will propose is radical, perhaps counterintuitive, but not in these offensive ways.

Let us start with what one should say to the Nazis at the door when one is not hiding Jews as this will shed light on the disputed case. It would be natural to think, I suppose, that the householder should simply deny that he has any Jews in the house. After all, it is true!

But the Nazi is not owed the truth as to whether one is concealing Jews even when one is not. His mission is wrongful regardless of whether one conceals or not. He has no legitimate authority, that having been lost long time since by the regime and those who worked for it. Yet he is a human being, and a child of God, and one cannot assume that his soul is beyond saving. One’s obligation, I hold, is to refuse to answer his question regarding the whereabouts of Jews (for he is owed no answer) and to tell him further that he is engaged in a wicked activity and to encourage his repentance.

What are the likely consequences of such action? One possible good consequence is this: a firm policy never to answer (especially if this policy is shared by others) makes it difficult for the Nazi to infer anything accurate from what he hears about the whereabouts of the Jews on any occasion. Having heard this twice when no Jews were to be found, he might, in fact, infer that there are no Jews hidden on the third occasion, though in fact there are. Moreover, a systematic policy of denying the authority asserted by wicked regimes can begin to break that power down—wicked regimes depend for their power on citizens remaining subjects. Of course, it is also possible that a refusal to answer will enrage the Nazi to the point of violence, even if no Jews are discovered. But one would be speaking truthfully and lovingly to this wicked but not God-forsaken man in the only way that could conceivably do some good for him, and in a way that does no evil to one’s self.

I suggest that the policy I have outlined should be adopted also when one does have Jews hidden in one’s house. And here again, the likely consequences are not good. In both scenarios, a search will likely be conducted, and in the second, the Jews found. What then?

I do not think one could in good conscience allow the Nazis to depart alone with the Jews. Physically resisting would likely be futile, but not necessarily wrong. One could offer to go with the Nazis in place of the Jews; and if that failed one could insist that one be brought with the Jews (it is very likely this decision would already have been made by the Nazis). And one should be willing to accept that a possibly significant degree of physical harm, perhaps even death, would be visited upon one’s person while one continued to proclaim the truth to the Nazis about the wickedness of their mission.

In all such actions one would act in solidarity with the Jews and charity towards the Nazi. One would witness to the truth in ways that, were more to do so, could conceivably be the undoing of the regime. And one might occasionally sway a young wrongdoer, one raised as a Christian, perhaps, but gradually corrupted by his culture, recollecting him to his better self and turning him towards the good.

It would be folly to predict that this is how I would act, or to assert that I would have the necessary courage for this were I put to the test—one reason, perhaps, that Christians pray not to be put to the test. And one might object as follows: In other less extreme circumstances, we need not risk all by speaking the truth to our enemies, and all of us keep silent in various circumstances where to fully speak our mind would be detrimental. Why go out of one’s way to speak the truth (not, I repeat, the truth about the hidden Jews) to the Nazis and risk such terrible consequences as one’s own martyrdom?

Here I will invoke, to considerably different purpose, an idea of Michael Walzer’s, that the threat of National Socialism constituted a “supreme emergency” against the ideals of civilization. Those ideals are closely linked to the ideals that I identified, in my first piece on this subject, as central to the pro-life movement itself: truth and love. National Socialism was built on lies and hate. Against such an enemy, one’s personal service to civilization could only be by a radical embrace of truth and love, in defiance of all consequences. Walzer’s suggestion regarding the supreme emergency was that the norms of a decent civilization—including that the innocent should not be intentionally killed—needed to be put on hold to defeat the Nazis. My suggestion is exactly the opposite.

Those who doubt the feasibility of such suggestions would do well to read the work of those brave individuals who struggled against the lies of totalitarian societies precisely by means of radical honesty: Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Adam Michnik in Poland, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the Soviet Union. Michnik’s words can stand in summary for the three:

Start doing the things you think should be done, and . . . start being what you think society should become. Do you believe in freedom of speech? Then speak freely. Do you love the truth? Then tell it. Do you believe in an open society? Then act in the open. Do you believe in a decent and humane society? Then behave decently and humanely.

I abhor lies not, as Samuel Johnson reportedly felt about medical lies, because they have been frequently practiced against me, but because I feel the temptation to dishonesty and deception keenly, and the subsequent strains on my integrity with great force. It would be madness to think that my criticisms of the lies of others stem from a thought that they have failed where I have succeeded. Quite the opposite. I cannot read Michnik’s words without feeling the sting of their reproach. I have written these three essays as much for myself as for anyone else who might care to learn from them.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

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Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

The first set of criticisms calls into question whether the behaviors and utterances of the Live Action “actors” were really lies. First, some think a false assertion is a lie only when told to those with a right to the truth. Second, some think that the Live Action actors made, or perhaps could have made, no false assertions.

The second set of criticisms concerns whether it is always wrong to lie; many critics deny just this, for one or more of the following reasons.

• One view would have it that lying is not wrong in war. A presupposition of this view, which is defended by Joseph Bottum, is that the pro-life movement is at war with Planned Parenthood and other purveyors of abortion.

• A second view holds that sometimes lying is defensible by double-effect type reasoning: the harms of lying must, on this view, not be intended. With this objection we get to the heart of the ethical matter: what are the harms of lying, and are they essential to the intention of someone who deliberately lies or not?

• A third view is that lying is permissible in order to save a human life; on this view, the prohibition on lying is simply not absolute.

• A fourth criticism concerns my claim that to lie is to fail in love to those lied to; some misunderstand this as a claim that what I call for is “gentleness” towards wrongdoers, perhaps to the exclusion of punishment, but I trust my claim that truthful correction of wrongdoing is genuinely loving suffices to show that I do not hold that view. But others argue that to deceive is not as such unloving, and that the lies told to Planned Parenthood workers were in fact to their good.

The third set of criticisms, finally, concern the consequences of my view. Many critics have claimed that if it is always and everywhere wrong to lie, then such practices as undercover police (or journalistic) work, and some forms of espionage are also wrong.

The Live Action “Actors” Lied

Let us begin, then, with the first set of objections. Was there really no lying done in the Live Action “stings”? Christopher Kaczor cites an early, and subsequently amended, version of the Catholic Catechism which defines lying as not telling the truth to “someone who has the right to know the truth” (CCC 2483). The quoted phrase is omitted in subsequent versions and for good reason. Consider the following scenario: I spend $500 of family money on gambling. My wife has a right to know what happened to this money; my ten-year old son does not. The “right to know” view would have it that I only lie to my wife when I assert to both that I gave the money away to charity. This seems clearly wrong, and points us towards the Catechism’s amended definition: “To lie is to speak or act against the truth in order to lead someone into error.” On this view, what is essential to a lie is that an agent assert, through speech or action, something he believes to be false; here is the nature of the lie, and thus here also is where the wrong must be found: not in a failure to respect an agent’s “right” to the truth.

But perhaps the Live Action agents did not actually make false assertions? A perusal of the transcripts suggests the implausibility of this view. In the Bronx Planned Parenthood Transcript, for example, the “pimp” says, “Now, also, so we’re involved in sex work, so we have some other girls that we manage and work with that they’re going to need testing as well.” While these seem like straightforward lies, some have suggested that “sex work” here is ambiguous, and that the actors mean something like “work that will end the sex trade.” I can only say that this view strains credulity.

Others have claimed that Live Action did, or could, work only with “hypotheticals”: “what would you say if…” sorts of questions. But consider again the Catechism’s definition of a lie, which suggests that one can lie in action as well as in speech, by using one’s actions—including, presumably, one’s personal presentation—against the truth, in order to lead someone into error. And this too the Live Action “actors” surely did: they were dressed and acted as pimps and prostitutes, not because this was how they usually dressed or acted, but precisely to convey information to the Planned Parenthood workers about what they were, information that they also conveyed in speech: “we’re involved in sex work.” So, it is not the case that they worked only in hypothetical questions, and it is unclear whether, in practice, a hypotheticals-only approach would, in fact, serve their ends.

So I believe we should conclude without doubt that the “actors” in the Live Action videos did indeed lie. This obviously raises the next crucial question: were they wrong to do so?

Lying is Always Wrong

As a preliminary point, those who think, for intellectual or religious reasons, that the theological and philosophical tradition of Western Christianity has evidential value should be much more impressed with the agreement between Augustine, Aquinas, the Council of Trent, and the updated Catechism, all of whom hold that the norm against lying is absolute, than with the secondary tradition which admittedly also exists within Christianity that holds that lying is occasionally permitted. Catholics in particular have very good reason for taking the updated Catechism’s view to be normative for them: “By its very nature, lying is to be condemned” (CCC 2485). This judgment reaffirms a claim from the Catechism of the Council of Trent: “In a word, lies of every sort are prohibited.” But we seek here some further understanding of why this unequivocal condemnation might be entirely reasonable.

The first objection was, to recall, that lying is permissible in war. In fact, the authorities mentioned in the previous paragraph did not hold this: Aquinas, for example, condemned lying in war, but he allowed that military feints might be carried out. In a military context, it is assumed (as it is in poker, and in the theater) that what is done will not always have the significance it otherwise might, since soldiers have good reason for preventing the enemy from inferring from what they do what their true plans are. Thus no false assertion is made by the feint. But if lying is always and everywhere wrong, these possibilities do not serve as counterexamples: they are not themselves lies.

More importantly here, however, it is crucial to point out that the pro-life movement is not, in any but the most distantly metaphorical sense, “at war” with Planned Parenthood. To take such a claim strictly would raise unsolvable problems in terms of just war thought: who, for example, is the legitimate authority that has tasked Lila Rose with this work? And it would justify untenable conclusions, for if anything is justified in war, it is the use of arms. Yet the pro-life movement has, rightly in my view, converged on an understanding that the use of arms to stop abortion is not right: it provides a counter-witness to the value of life; it constitutes an unjustified attack on our nation’s overall legal structure; and it is unlikely either to bring peace or to result in a proportionate balance of benefits over harms. The appeal to war is thus a non-starter.

Perhaps, as some suggest, lying could be justified via double effect? As I noted, this question gets us to the heart of the matter, for double effect reasoning is appropriate when there is a moral principle forbidding the intentional bringing about of some harm. Some actions, which bring about that kind of harm nevertheless can be justified because the harm is not intended, but merely foreseen. Thus, assuming that the taking of human life is a harm, and that it is always wrong to intend that harm, nevertheless, many moralists defend some actions which result in death, because the death is not intended.

Now: what are the harms of lying? To answer this question we must understand something of the goodness of truthful communication, for it is that goodness that is, presumably, absent in lying. And that goodness is, I shall suggest, multiple.

In truthful communication, persons disclose, or reveal, reality in two dimensions. Consider the common case of being asked by a stranger for directions. He does not know how to get to a theater, and you provide him directions: you tell him where to go. In this example, your honest communication reveals to him the way the world is, to his benefit. Without such revelation, the truth would be unavailable to our stranger, as would all the other goods that would be available by means of the truth, such as the stranger’s getting to the theater in time to meet his friends and enjoy the show.

But truthful communication also discloses something personal: in affirming that things are this way, not that, not only do you reveal the world to the stranger, but you reveal yourself as well: this, not that, is how you take things to be. When the stranger hears the directions, he does not just hear words; because of the personal dimension of communication, he hears you. And this disclosure’s personal nature is responsible for a well-known aspect of such small gestures of kindness to a stranger as providing accurate directions: to disclose oneself to another through honest communication is a primordial act of the creation of a community, a community which, in this case, is short-lived, but no less real for that.

It is this disclosing aspect of language that has made speech such a natural analogue, in the work of John Paul II, to the self-giving by which spouses enter into marital communion with one another—hence his image of the “language of the body.” And perhaps we can even work backwards from the mutual giving of selves in the body, which characterizes marital union, to the wrong of lying, by way of the following analogy.

Imagine the sexual receptivity of a wife towards her husband that conceals an attitude that is other than one of self-donation; such a concealment would be both a mutilation of the relationship as physically embodied in the union, and of the spouse whose actions are at odds with her inner thoughts and attitudes. More concretely, consider a spouse who fantasizes during marital intercourse about another, or thinks only of his or her own pleasure in the act, or who wishes he was unmarried. Such a spouse is damaging the relationship, but also damaging him or herself by dividing his or her self into the physical (but only illusory) giver of self, and the inner lover of self.

This is indeed quite similar to the wrong of lying. In a lie, a person divides his or her self, making her outer person to say one thing, while her “inner” self believes something else. “Inner” and “outer” are somewhat, but only somewhat, metaphorical here. One’s full self is not, in fact, disclosed just by one’s physical being in the world; it remains for one to communicate much of who and what one is to others in acts and words. When that disclosure is truthful, inner and outer are brought into harmony; when dishonest, inner and outer are sundered.

Could this division be anything but a harm to a person? We show in many ways the value of being able to present a “true face” to the world, as when we rebel at restrictions on freedom of expression, or resent an ideological pressure that prevents us from speaking freely, or when, because of our desire not to harm, we succumb to pressure and say what someone else wants to hear. We respect those who are what they seem, and who speak straightforwardly and with candor: we admire their integrity, precisely that which we see damaged in one who cannot, or will not, speak his mind.

So here is the initial harm of the lie: it divides the inner and outer self, damaging the agent’s integrity; and integrity is a great good. (I expand on this argument in my article in the American Journal of Jurisprudence “Lying: The Integrity Approach.”)

But, as the example of the stranger in need of directions indicated, truth in self-disclosure just is the primordial means by which we establish community with another; and the forming of community—the entering into communion—with others just is what it means to love another (thus, naturally enough, as there are many forms of communion, there are many forms of love, and not all are equally appropriate to each person). But this too is damaged in the lie. The essential disclosure of persons to other persons that brings them into a unity is impossible on the foundation of dishonest communication. That communication does not disclose; it seeks to conceal.

There is thus a very strong connection between the virtue of honesty and both the integrity of the self and the unity of persons in love, and a very strong connection between dishonesty—lies—and disharmony of the self and disharmony with others. Of course, the specific truths that are communicated often can play a further role in the building up of community with others, because those truths are, as again the example of the lost stranger showed, essential to the pursuit of many other goods. Yet some truths are not essential in these ways, and yet others could be harmful, so there is no obligation to say all that one knows to be true. Such a duty is not implied by an obligation never to lie.

We now have the resources to make quick work of the central objections to the claim that it is always wrong to lie. Against the claim that double effect reasoning could play a role, for example, we see the following difference between lying and using lethal force: intending death is not intrinsic to the use of force and thus can be accepted as a side effect, but the division of the self that just is the destruction of one’s integrity is intrinsic to the telling of a lie. This harm just is part of what anyone who sets himself to assert what he does not believe to be true intends.

We thus see also why the prohibition on lying is absolute: the goods of integrity and community are fundamental goods, and in themselves, they are nothing but goods, for human persons. In themselves, they thus give us only reason to pursue and promote them for ourselves and others. Things would be different if integrity or community were good only in some respects, but not in others; we would then have reason to seek them, and reason to avoid or prevent them; but just in themselves, they are goods. Action directed at the destruction of one of these goods would thus be, as such, nothing but harmful to persons, and thus wrong. And the prohibition against lying gives witness to this. In speech and action, these goods are never to be intentionally damaged, and as we have seen, a lie always involves such intentional damage.

Of course, most lies are not just intentional damagings of the liar’s integrity, but damagings for the sake of some further good. Yet, since the damage just as such gives no reason to carry out the lie, such a choice could only be justified if the good sought were a greater good than the harm caused by the lie. Such an idea is at the heart of the reasoning of those who believe it permissible to lie to save a life. The good of life must be greater than the good of personal integrity on such an account.

Yet we have no reason to think such weighing is possible; by what measure is there more good in life than integrity? And if that is how the scales come down, than ought not a man to foreswear his faith, or abandon the truth, to save his life? Yet if the weighing is not possible, then the conclusion is clear: there can be no “exceptions” to the norm against intentionally lying, even for serious reasons.

Finally, I believe I have shown why all lies are unloving. It is not because they are not sufficiently gentle, or because they cause hurt feelings, or lose jobs. It is because they are incompatible in the deepest way with a will towards communion with others, which must always be founded on truth, both generally speaking (for falsehood does indeed bring with it many pernicious consequences for a community), and, more specifically, the truth of persons. I have no doubt that the actions of Lila Rose and her Live Action colleagues are ultimately motivated by love; but in utilizing lies and deceit, they have built on a treacherous foundation, thus threatening the entire construction.

Many of our Current Practices are Wrong, Too

The truth that all lies are wrong and that they must all be avoided is hard, no less for polities than for individuals. And this brings us to the final set of objections, which I will here address only briefly. Those objections concerned the practices of undercover work, espionage work, and other forms of journalistic, police, and governmental work that might require lying. Some have expressed surprise that these practices should be called into question; yet Augustine felt it necessary to address the morality of lying precisely in order to stop the practice of Christians infiltrating heretical sects for the defense of the faith; so questioning the legitimacy of undercover work is a very old part of the Christian tradition (I have argued against such work in a philosophical vein in my book Biomedical Research and Beyond: Expanding the Ethics of Inquiry).

The position I have argued for here could not easily be adhered to. And a firm commitment, by any person, or any group, to avoid all lies would inevitably have radical consequences. For there is no doubt that we are surrounded by lies, by deceit, by dishonesty and that each one of us drinks of this cup too often, even in a day’s work. We would lose what we might take to be essential tools of daily life, both personally and politically, were lies taken away from us.

Yet these are only consequences of my view, they are not themselves arguments, and anyone who believes, as members of the great Abrahamic religions do, that the Father of Lies is at the root of much evil, must make a constant struggle not to let their commitment to truth become obscured by the demands of the fallen world. That we have become conformed in our social practice to lies as an essential part of the defense of the realm, and for the protection of citizens, just as in our personal lives, is a fact; indeed, this conformity is, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, the very demand which evil and violence make upon us: “obedience to lies and daily participation in lies.” But this participation is neither an inevitability, nor, in my view, a reflection of what is genuinely demanded by truth and love.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

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Truth, because the pro-life movement is founded on a set of scientific facts about unborn human beings. The zygote, the embryo, the fetus: all are members of the species homo sapiens, individual human beings just as much as any reader, or the author, of this article. On this truth, developmental biology has converged with remarkable unanimity, and efforts to obscure this by referring to unborn human beings as “clumps of cells,” and “tissue,” or as merely “embryos” and “fetuses,” are bound to fail.

Love, because the pro-life movement is founded on an ethical claim: that all human beings are deserving of the same fundamental form of respect. All deserve to be treated as equal in their humanity and dignity. Love and respect for all human beings are, like the truths of biology previously mentioned, lessons learned over a long time, and honored all too often in the breach rather than the observance. Yet these are moral truths that the pro-life movement strives to bring to the minds and hearts of all who consider the worth of unborn human life.

Even those who recognize these facts about the pro-life movement might be hesitant to state their corollary: that the so-called pro-choice movement is premised on a lie and—despite the unquestioned good intentions of its members and supporters— is opposed to love. In this connection, the startling videos from Lila Rose’s Live Action group are highly telling. In them, Planned Parenthood workers are shown as willing to facilitate abortions for minors without parental consent, and, perhaps even more damningly, as willing to overlook sex trafficking and statutory rape. It is no exaggeration to say that the corruption in Planned Parenthood’s rank and file merely reflects the profound moral error at the core of an organization that must deny truth and love so as to destroy life.

Planned Parenthood’s very mission infects its practice, revealing it to be a parody of a real medical organization. A willingness to help all in need, and to protect patients’ privacy and confidentiality, are important parts of the practice of medicine. Yet these virtues are perverted by employees willing to overlook crimes, such as sex trafficking, that are among the most grievous harms that can be inflicted upon women. By trying to enable a pimp to get his underage prostitutes medical care for venereal diseases, the New Jersey Planned Parenthood worker, subsequently fired, showed herself unable to distinguish between providing medical help, and aiding in the systematic abuse of women.

The worker’s shady ethics reflect the confusion of an organization that persistently and deliberately conflates killing and care. In its continuing propaganda onslaught, Planned Parenthood passes up no opportunity to identify its purpose as “reproductive health.” Yet the provision of abortion is clearly not a form of health care, reproductive or otherwise. Indeed, it is the very opposite. Even the provision of birth control, arguments about its morality aside, does not rectify any illness or pathology, nor does it solve any genuine health need. It is undeniably good that Live Action’s videos have brought attention to this facet of Planned Parenthood’s existence.

Live Action has done the further great service of shining light on the sources of Planned Parenthood’s funding. Currently, Planned Parenthood receives approximately 350 million dollars a year from the federal government. But a combination of changes in the House of Representatives after the 2010 elections, and the effects of the Live Action videos, has led to calls to defund Planned Parenthood. These calls are long overdue, and should be heeded immediately. Planned Parenthood does not contribute to the medical common good, but to its opposite; and its mission and activities are plainly at odds with the deepest conscientious moral judgments of a great many of the American people. Our tax dollars rightly go to such essential projects as defense of the realm and, as I have argued in Public Discourse before, support of the needs of citizens who are incapable of caring for themselves. They should not go to any provider of abortion services, even if the revenue streams—tax dollars and private monies—are artificially kept separate.

Yet for all the good that may come of these videos, the way in which Live Action has made its mark is itself extremely troubling, for it is predicated on a form of falsity, which is exercised in an unloving way. Promising and welcome as the effects of these videos might be, they represent a real and dangerous corruption of the pro-life movement itself by endangering the pro-life movement’s commitment to its ideals of love and truth.

It is tempting to refer to the “pimp” character in Live Action’s videos as an “actor.” But this is misleading. Actors perform for willing and aware audiences who realize they are watching a fiction. The “pimp,” rather, lied, repeatedly and pervasively, in his conversation with the Planned Parenthood worker: he presented himself as other than he truly was, and his purpose in doing so was clearly to deceive.

In so presenting himself, the “pimp,” and all those who abetted him, did damage to his own integrity, creating for himself an appearance in the world deliberately at odds with his inner self. But integrity—a unity of one’s acting self in all its aspects—is a great good, and we destroy that unity in a lie only at a great cost to our wellbeing (this cost is recognized in feelings of guilt and in our attempts to ensure that we do not present a false face to the world).

Of course, the makers of the Live Action video could argue that the end—the good sought—justified a morally problematic means. But such a form of argument is a centerpiece of those arguments for abortion which acknowledge the “special respect and value” owed the unborn child, but which still justify his or her destruction for the sake of the consequences. “Do no evil that good may come about” should be central to the pro-life movement’s ethos.

Nor can it be said that Live Action’s behavior towards the Planned Parenthood workers was loving. Under most circumstances, to speak the truth to another just is a demand of love. But under all circumstances, to seek to deceive is to create a relationship with another based on falsity, and this seems inevitably to be unloving. While often undesired, it is a paradigmatically loving thing to do to make known to another the moral wrongness of what they are doing. Indeed, those who protest and pray outside abortion clinics are acting lovingly in speaking the truth. But to encourage wrongdoing through falsity does no good for the deceived agent.

So, while the increased scrutiny of Planned Parenthood is a good thing, and will conceivably lead to the even greater good of a general defunding of this morally bankrupt organization, I can take no joy in Live Action’s approach. They seem to have “fought fire with fire,” combating deceit and lack of charity with more of the same. The pro-life movement must be better than that, always, and it must be willing to engage in self-criticism when it fails to meet its own exacting standards.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2011 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

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But a better strategy might be to accept the liberal definition of pregnancy, but reject the conclusions that purportedly follow from it. On three issues—contraception, abortion, and embryo-adoption—I’ll argue that the liberal definition of pregnancy can actually help clarify what sound morality demands.

There are, after all, plausible reasons to think the liberal definition sound. Pregnancy signifies a relationship between the developing human being and his or her mother, but that relationship is not simply the relationship of being the mother of an embryonic child. Mothers of embryos conceived through in-vitro fertilization (IVF), for example, are not pregnant while their children are in Petri dishes. Nor does it seem to be enough simply for an embryo to exist within some part of a woman for the woman to be pregnant. We are inclined to think that in pregnancy the embryo or fetus is connected to the mother in a special way. So, plausibly, a mother becomes pregnant, as liberals think, at the time that the embryo implants in the mother’s womb. At that time, in addition to being a mother of a child, the woman also stands in a uniquely intimate biological relationship of nurturing and sustenance to the developing child, a relationship it makes sense to call “pregnancy.”

But why do liberal proponents of this definition think that it has consequences for understanding the difference between contraception and abortion? The answer, it seems, lies primarily in their misunderstanding of the nature of contraception. For contraception is not a practice whose purpose is the prevention of pregnancy, but a practice whose purpose is the prevention of the conception of a new human being. Consider: someone who prevents an embryonic human being from being implanted in a woman after IVF is not reasonably thought to be contracepting. Someone contracepts only if they intend to prevent a human being from coming into existence—they act contra-conception.

So the questions surrounding whether the so-called “week-after pill” Ella—or the contraceptive pill, or an IUD—operates only as a contraceptive really has very little to do with pregnancy. The real question is whether they work exclusively by preventing possible human beings from coming into existence, or whether they ever work by making it impossible for already existing human beings to continue to exist. If they do the latter, they are not exclusively contraceptive.

What about abortion: is it not a disruption of pregnancy? Interfering with the life of a not yet implanted embryo usually takes the life of that embryo, yet it does not, if we accept the liberal definition of pregnancy, terminate a pregnancy. Does this make it difficult to say that drugs or devices that take the life of a pre-implantation embryo are abortifacient?  One approach to the question of what abortion is might say yes.

This approach identifies abortion, or direct abortion, precisely as the intentional ending of pregnancy. But even apart from the question of how pregnancy is to be defined, this is a bad definition of abortion. Ending a pregnancy seems neither necessary nor sufficient for a procedure to be an abortion. Not necessary, because an embryo or fetus could be removed from the mother, thus ending the pregnancy, precisely to save the child’s life, if, for example, the mother was incapable of sustaining the child in the womb. Not sufficient because an embryo or fetus could be aborted without the mother’s pregnancy ending. This, sadly, is what happens when mothers undergo “selective reduction” of embryos when they are carrying multiple children. These mothers abort, but remain pregnant.

It seems more plausible to think that abortion causes the death of an unborn child, and that a “direct” abortion is an intentional killing of the unborn child. Not only does such a definition avoid the problem cases just mentioned, it draws attention to what is wrong with abortion in a way that the “ending of a pregnancy” definition does not. For while ending a pregnancy is, just as such, a serious matter—under most circumstances, mothers surely owe it to their unborn children to provide them with a uterine home until birth—the wrong of direct abortion is, more specifically, the wrong of intentionally killing one’s unborn child, not the wrong of expelling it from the womb.

Moreover, the distinction allows one to acknowledge that there might be cases in which only the ending of pregnancy was intended, and not the death of the child. Would this justify ending a pregnancy if the intention was not to kill? In almost every imaginable case, no: For to accept the death of one’s own child as a side effect of ending one’s pregnancy is unjust in every circumstance except when otherwise both the mother and child will certainly die. So while direct abortions are always wrong on this account, indirect abortions—the kind that are a result of ending pregnancy—are also wrong in the overwhelming majority of cases. Moreover, it would seem reasonable to adopt, as a convention, the practice of referring to all procedures that take the life of an unborn human being, whether intentionally, or indirectly but unjustly, simply as “abortions”: it would then be fair to say that all abortions are morally impermissible.

And yet, some problem cases will, arguably, be settled in a different way. Consider the use of methotrexate when used to address a tubal ectopic pregnancy (methotrexate is also used for “elective” abortions). Given where the embryo has implanted, if nothing is done both mother and child could die. Methotrexate works by inhibiting the growth of the trophoblastic tissue that connects child to mother. It also inevitably results in the death of the embryo. Its use seems to fall into the category of “intentionally ending pregnancy,” yet not into the category of “intentionally killing an unborn child.” Thus, if a mother’s life is truly at risk, and there is no possible way to save the child, then deliberately ending a tubal pregnancy by use of methotrexate might not be an instance of “direct abortion,” i.e., not an instance of intentional killing of an unborn child, and might, in fact, be an instance of rightly accepting death as a side effect. But this possibility is likely to be overlooked if abortion is equated with the intentional ending of a pregnancy.

Consider a third case: the question of embryo adoption and rescue, a vexed issue among many conservative bioethicists. Sound moralists acknowledge that one should never separate the unitive and the procreative aspects of the marital act; in other words, marital sexual acts should be open to new life; and new life should not be created outside the performance of marital sexual acts. But neither, the philosopher Mary Geach has argued, should the marital act be imitated in respect to either function. And so the question arises whether, when a woman becomes pregnant through the implanting the biological child of another, the allowing of the embryo into her womb imitates a function specific to the marital act, for, in Geach’s words, in both the marital act, and in embryo transfer, the woman performs an act “an act of admission whereby she allows an intromission of impregnating kind.”

Several philosophers have argued, however, that it is the generative significance of conjugal intercourse—the capacity of sexual union to result in a new human being—that is essential to its unitive significance—the capacity of the marital act to make the spouses “one flesh.” It is not, in other words, the “capacity to make pregnant” that makes man and woman one flesh but rather the capacity to generate new life.

In consequence, the transfer of a human embryo to the womb of a woman who is not that child’s biological mother, whether to rescue the child from the absurd fate of cryo-preservation, or as the first step of a process of adoption, does not imitate the marital act in respect of any of its proper functions. The liberal definition of pregnancy helps us see this because it makes clear that generating a child, and being pregnant with a child, are two different realities.

Yet accepting this definition does not result, I have shown, in the false claim that a process that prevents implantation of an embryo is thereby “merely” contraceptive. And this definition can help us see that there are some procedures which end a pregnancy but are not acts which intentionally take the life of an unborn child. Acts of the latter sort are intrinsically wrong and always morally impermissible, but some acts of the former sort may be morally permissible when otherwise both the mother and child will certainly die.


Editor’s note: The original version of this essay incorrectly stated the views of Mary Geach. We apologize for the error.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

While technologically the atomic bombs marked a departure from earlier bombing raids in Japan and in Europe, which had required many bombers and tons of ordinance, strategically, these two raids were of a piece with earlier allied actions. The American firebombing of Tokyo, for example, killed roughly 100,000 people. The Allied bombings of Dresden and Hamburg, meanwhile, deliberately targeted “built up” residential areas and killed tens of thousands of German citizens. These bombing raids were part of a strategy of demoralization in which military facilities and armament production were not the main targets. By deliberately attacking civilian populations the Allies hoped to teach their enemies a lesson and bring them to their knees.

Some few Catholic scholars, notably Elizabeth Anscombe and Fr. John Ford, S.J. argued at the time that the Allied approach was immoral. Their argument, which drew from a moral tradition dating back to St. Augustine, was based on the premise that intentionally killing the “innocent” was always a grave wrong. Both Anscombe and Ford noted that, despite occasional confusion, the meaning of “innocent” could not be “morally innocent,” but rather must mean “not posing a threat.” For it is a threat that justifies the use of defensive force in war, not the moral character of individual civilians who might be morally at fault in their support of, say, the Nazi government, yet be engaged only the in same tasks they would have been working on in peacetime: growing and distributing food, caring for their families, working in the medical profession, and so on. Given this approach to the distinction, Ford estimated that as much as two thirds of the city of Boston would, during World War Two, have been “innocents,” when women, children, and the aged were factored in.

The Allied bombings in Europe, then, and the firebombing and atomic bombing in Japan, seem to have been deliberate targeting of civilian populations: in other words, intentional attacks on innocent human life. And, if Anscombe’s and Ford’s premise about intentional killing of the innocent is correct, then the conclusion is inescapable: these Allied actions constituted murder on a vast scale, running to hundreds of thousands of lives.

Two possible justifications might be offered for these actions. One is that German forces had also, and earlier, attacked British citizens, thus initiating the targeting of non-combatants. Something like this seems to have been foreseen by the British, for, in 1939, President Roosevelt had asked for assurances from the warring parties that there would be no targeting of civilians. The British had agreed, but added a condition saying that they reserved the right to adopt “appropriate measures” in the event that Germany should attack civilians. Yet the right not to be murdered, and the obligation not to murder, are not conditional on what other persons might or might not be doing. Those attacking may, of course, be defended against; but their moral wrongs do not, as such, provide a license to any party to abandon moral norms themselves. Nor, as noted, were German civilians themselves the ones attacking. So the “reprisal” justification fails.

Similarly, the outright consequentialist justifications that were offered then, and continue, in some cases, to be offered today, fail, for two reasons. First, there are inevitable epistemic limitations to our knowledge about what would have been the case without these Allied attacks. Would the war really have lasted longer and cost many more lives? What were the long-term, as opposed to the short-term, consequences of dropping the bomb? There is much speculation on these questions but little, if any, real knowledge.

Second, and more importantly, why should we think that there really are “best possible consequences?” How are the lives of innocent Japanese and German women, children, sick, elderly, and non-military personnel to be weighed against the lives of Allied fighters in such a way as to make clear that saving a certain number of Allied lives was “better” all things considered than killing a much larger number of enemy civilians? The impossibility of such a calculation, and the dignity of each human being, as a free and rational creature, seem together to be at the root of the traditional injunction never intentionally to kill the innocent. Meanwhile, the abandonment of this injunction seems to be at the root of the philosophical and cultural move in the direction which Anscombe called consequentialism.

The Allied bombings were, therefore, by the standards of traditional, non-consequentialist morality, utterly wrong and intrinsically unjustifiable. And this great moral evil has itself had consequences, some of which it is salutary to note now, more than half a century later.

Some of those consequences have been to the good. Thankfully, the inference which Anscombe and Ford drew from the moral injunction against intentional killing to the moral conclusion against area (or terror) bombing has increasingly become part of our Western military ethic. The option is apparently no longer available to the generals in any Western army to order the obliteration of a city for the sake of inducing its rulers to surrender. And this surely must be considered moral progress in the making of war.

Yet other consequences indicate that the moral lessons of World War Two have not fully been absorbed, or, if they have, that they have been absorbed in the way that bad acts usually are: they are absorbed into the character of those who performed those acts, or approved them, and never repudiated them. For it cannot truly be said, for all the progress in military ethics, that the West has fully repudiated either the Allies’ actions, or the consequentialism underlying them. Anscombe would surely be a minority figure today, as she was in the 1950’s, for holding that a “couple of massacres” to the credit of Harry Truman made him unworthy as a candidate for an honorary degree at Oxford; and Winston Churchill is today considered a great hero of the War, despite considerable evidence that he was a major architect of the policy of terror bombing. And, finally, there are still many in the West willing to defend the atomic bombings as decisions difficult but necessary for the common good.

So the actions have not been repudiated; nor has the consequentialism, which is nakedly on display in the West’s willingness to countenance the killing of unborn children for the sake of avoiding negative consequences, to countenance the killing of in vitro human beings for the sake of the positive health consequences, and, for many decades, to countenance the conditional elimination of entire populations in the event that their leaders should strike us with atomic weapons. In each case, a decision has been made that innocent human lives are not to be held sacrosanct, or inviolable, if the consequences of doing so would be too significant. The consequentialist ethic of the Allied bombings is thus still with us, and plays a continuing, and horrific, role in our public and private moral deliberations.

There are, finally, some problem areas, puzzles regarding which we have not yet determined how the lessons of World War Two are to be brought to bear. As I noted, military ethics now take for granted that civilians are not to be targeted. Perhaps, however, that has simply made our leaders more scrupulous about calling civilian casualties “collateral damage,” even when they are willing to accept many more such casualties than they would harm to our own troops. But the original precept against killing the innocent no matter what the consequences is based on an even deeper truth: the fundamental and radical equality of all human beings as persons, as free and rational beings whose lives are each loci of intrinsic and incommensurable value. The West’s willingness to bomb at a distance, engage in drone attacks, and tolerate, in Iraq and Afghanistan, wildly disproportionate numbers of civilian casualties, suggests that our soldiers do indeed count more than their wives, children, and elderly. While this may be an understandable viewpoint in any society, it is not, for all that, a correct one.

So Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings that preceded them, the decisions that led to them, and the rationalizations that justified them, remain with us today, underwriting both some of our most grievous moral errors, and our more ambiguous moral triumphs. As individuals, and especially as a nation, it still remains for us to grasp the deep significance of those fateful, and horrible, days.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

In many of these cases there are good reasons for the apparent asymmetries between our treatment of the born and the unborn, reasons which do not vitiate in the slightest our claim that as regards killing, there should be no asymmetry: it is equally wrong deliberately to kill an unborn human being and a human being at any other stage of development.

But even the asymmetries have limits, and one is prominently on display, I shall argue, in the recently passed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). As has been widely noted, one difference between the Senate version of health-care legislation (which was passed) and the House version, is that the latter hewed more closely to the Hyde Amendment’s restriction against any federal dollars being used, not only to pay for any abortions (except in cases of danger to the mother’s life, rape, or incest), but also against any funding of a plan that covers abortion. PPACA does fund such plans, through an elaborate mechanism designed to screen federal dollars from the actual financing of abortions.

Under PPACA, each state must have a health plan that does not provide abortion coverage; so far, so good, and many states are in the process of passing legislation ensuring that they will have no plans that do. But states are not forbidden from providing abortion-covering plans, and, insofar as they do, they must adopt the following “segregation of funds” mechanism for preventing federal funding of abortion procedures: states must take in two premium payments per pay period from each enrollee in an abortion-providing plan, one payment of which will go exclusively to abortion coverage. No federal funds are to go into this abortion “pool,” and this mechanism is supposed to do justice to Hyde’s restrictions on federal funding of abortion.

Whether such a mechanism is genuinely in keeping with the letter or spirit of Hyde, and whether such a mechanism will, in fact, have the effect of increasing the abortion rate, are important issues which I will not address here. I wish rather to make an argument regarding the participation of pro-life citizens in the abortion-covering plans.

Currently, many pro-life citizens are, undoubtedly, in abortion-covering insurance plans. Such enrollees pay a premium that ensures their participation in the plan, knowing that the money collected from all premiums together pays for a set of benefits that includes abortion coverage. Pro-life enrollees do not will such coverage, but accept it as a side effect of their legitimate attempt to provide health insurance for themselves and their families, and such acceptance is perhaps reasonable if they have no other health insurance option (if, for example, their employer offers only plans with abortion coverage).

As Richard Doerflinger has pointed out in a recent essay in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, the segregation-of-funds approach raises new difficulties for pro-life enrollees, for the money that the pro-life enrollee gives to the abortion pool is known to be destined solely for abortion coverage. And the bill seems to rule out the possibility of a conscientious opt-out of the abortion pool for pro-life individuals.

This creates the possibility that individuals and families for whom the non-abortion-providing plan offers benefits inferior to those of the abortion providing plan—benefits that might be of considerable importance relative to the individual or family’s specific situation—might therefore be led to adopt the abortion-providing plan. And in such a case, their money would be going directly to the abortion pool with no opt-out available.

Some commentators have described this situation as one in which pro-life enrollees are thereby “forced” to pay for abortions; others have described the conscience of such enrollees as necessarily “compromised.” Such descriptions, it seems to me, suggest that at the end of the day it could be morally acceptable, although objectively unjust to the enrollee, that he or she nevertheless enroll in the superior, but abortion-covering plan. For only if our hypothetical pro-life citizen enrolls is he or she forced, and is his or her conscience compromised, by the compulsory contribution to the abortion pool.

I shall take for granted that the existence of plans with mandatory abortion pools is indeed objectively unjust to pro-life citizens, as it is also to the unborn. But my question here is whether pro-life citizens can indeed, as a moral matter, enroll, even if with regret, distaste, anger, etc. Such citizens would never pay for an abortion of their own; is there an asymmetry here, such that their payment into the abortion pool is nevertheless morally permissible?

Suppose that PPACA required, not an abortion pool, but an infanticide pool, or an unwanted adolescent homicide pool, or an unwanted spouse homicide pool. That is, suppose that the pool existed to make possible the killings of born human beings of any age. Payment into the pool was, as in the current PPACA, a necessary condition for a particularly beneficial type of coverage; thus there was strong motivation for paying in, and some, perhaps serious, sacrifice to be expected from not paying in. But, as in current PPACA, it was also possible not to enter the pool: other packages were available that did not involve the homicide pools.

It is abundantly clear that no such pool would be tolerated, regardless of the subtleties of an argument that paying into the pool would, or would not, involve complicity in the contemplated homicides, or even if it were possible or even inevitable that the homicides might not, in fact, be performed. We would not accept the stated possibility or desirability that others or ourselves could be victims of such a pool as the possible cost of making even these significant benefits available. The very idea of such pools is offensive and unacceptable, even if the pool never led to a single actual homicide.

But this means that in the case of current health care legislation, pro-lifers are contemplating paying into a pool with effects on the unborn that we would never find tolerable where born human beings such as ourselves or our loved ones are concerned. (This would be true even if no abortions resulted from the pool.) And this is a failure of the Golden Rule, to do unto others as you would be done by. To pay into the abortion pool would thus be unfair, and hence unjust, to the unborn.

Thus, while there is a clear danger that pro-lifers will not have available to them health-care plans that cover all their most important needs (an injustice to pro-lifers), there should be no danger that pro-lifers will be forced to pay into the abortion pool, or forced to allow their dollars to be used for abortions. Pro-life citizens will continue to work for rectification of PPACA (for example, by supporting HR 5111, which attempts to correct many of the current legislation’s inadequacies), but they must not, pending such rectification, adopt any plan with PPACA’s segregated funding for abortion, lest they truly adopt a double standard regarding the unborn.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

What, then, justifies the right of a nation to secure its borders? What, that is, justifies a nation’s right to exclude?

Consider first the idea of self-governance. The forms of self-governance characteristic of Western liberal democracies—free and fair elections, representative government based on public deliberation, checks and balances, and the like—are not, I think, the primary reasons for which political authority is warranted. These primary reasons include needs closer to necessary conditions for human flourishing: protection from threats internal and external to a community, coordination of a common form of life, and provision of some basic welfare needs to those who would otherwise be incapable of providing for themselves and who would also not be adequately cared for by others.

These needs could be met by a largely authoritarian form of political authority. Yet something in such an arrangement would clearly be deficient from the standpoint of our sense of human dignity, freedom, and equality. The role of subject, we have come to see, is not as fitting as the role of citizen.

So the need for citizenship, while not primary, is nevertheless of considerable importance to a people who wish to obtain forms of political rule compatible with their human dignity, freedom, and equality. And citizenship, in turn, can be understood, as Will Kymlicka puts it, as “membership in a self-governing political community.” Thus, self-governance is a legitimate and important political aspiration of a free people.

This ideal of self-governance clearly constrains the variety of ways in which a society could understand both itself and its relationships to other societies. But any self-governing society, in order to maintain its existence as such a society into the future, must possess and exercise a robust, though on occasion defeasible, right of exclusion.

The reason for this is simple. Self-governance requires a shared self-understanding. A society that has no shared sense of who it is, and of what common values, history, language, and cultural forms bind its members together, is not a single society after all. It is precisely through exclusion—through demands that entrants to the society meet certain requirements tied to shared values, history, language, or culture—that society maintains that shared sense of self. Were there no right to exclusion, or only a very weak right, then society would be in such a state of flux as to be incapable of deliberating, choosing, and acting as a single social reality. Mere contestation, or worse, would become the primary mode of politics.

Of course, the rights of self-governance and exclusion have limits. The exigent needs of refugees from political persecution and natural disaster can generate demands that must, morally, be met by a people with the resources and the ability, perhaps due to geographic proximity, to meet them. Yet to deny the right to exclusion altogether is ultimately, as John Finnis has noted in discussing liberal multiculturalism, to risk the “self-destruction of liberal states by the admission and fostering of illiberal minorities.”

It would appear, in consequence, that when the right of exclusion is flouted or inadequately enforced, then the society in question suffers from the standpoint of the standard of self-governance. That society does not, perhaps, deliberate adequately; or perhaps it does not come to a judgment; or perhaps it does not put its judgments into action; and, in any case, its deliberations, judgments, and actions fail to meet the forms of cooperation from others necessary for success. This is one moral cost to society of unchecked illegal immigration.

A society can be morally injured in other ways by illegal immigration. In the United States illegal immigration is in large part a function of a desire for work; but this desire could be effective in motivating immigration to the U.S. only if there was, in fact, work for illegal immigrants to do, often for less money than would be otherwise paid, and without any tax burden on employers. And thus the U.S. is in the untenable position of saying both “no” and “yes” to illegal immigration. We condemn it, while at the same time we collectively and individually benefit by it, and allow ourselves to depend upon it.

This is a failure of self-governance in a different sense from the one already canvassed. A society with such incompatible desires is, like an individual whose life is structured by warring motivations, lacking in integrity and self-control. Its failure is akin to that of an addict, committed to overcoming his dependence, but incapable of doing so today, and thus acting in ways contrary to his commitment. For such a person, or such a society, there is, in a sense, no one self to be determined yet, but two, in need of unification.

I wish to mention two further moral costs: to the illegal immigrant, and to legal immigrants.

Illegal immigrants to the United States are hardly in a better situation than a disunified society, from a moral standpoint. For, caught in a social world that both needs them but refuses to legally ratify their presence, they depend upon the bad faith and dishonesty of others, and acquiesce repeatedly in that same dishonesty. In this, the illegal immigrant is in something like the condition of the subject of a totalitarian society: The illegal immigrant must live a lie, and is encouraged to live that lie—to tell the truth would be to dismantle the structures on which his livelihood depends.

But a life pervasively structured by deceit and dishonesty is as bad spiritually and morally for the one lying as well as the one(s) lied to. The illegal immigrant suffers a profound failure of integrity, insofar as his external life and internal life are in constant tension. In a social world in which lying is a necessity, the illegal immigrant thus also suffers from a failure of self-governance: he cannot take charge of his personality and bring internal and external unity to it in a virtuous manner.

In addition to the costs to society as a whole and to the illegal immigrants in particular, there is the burden born by legal immigrants and even some citizens who can come under suspicion or abuse at least partly because they are suspected of being illegal. Such unfair treatment would not exist were there little or no illegal immigration, and it seems a serious problem with the Arizona legislation that it has the potential to increase this particular burden on legal immigrants.

Two conclusions can be drawn from these considerations. The first, following from the discussion of the right of exclusion, is that a state may legitimately restrict entrance in order to maintain the ability of its people to govern themselves and to pursue their common good. The second is that states should make a considerable effort to eliminate illegal immigration and the social structures that facilitate it, such as widespread employment of illegal workers. But neither of these tells us positively how states should think about either the prospects of future legal immigration, or how to deal with those immigrants currently in the country illegally. In conclusion, I wish to suggest that two virtues could be important in thinking about these problems.

The first I call the virtue of generous neighborliness. While it is true that in an abstract way all immigrants around the world may seem to have an equal right to try to gain entrance to the U.S., it is simply a brute fact that we, an extremely prosperous country, border a country in which many people struggle to make ends meet, and in which peace and justice are hard to come by. While the argument from self-governance allows fairly wide latitude to a country to determine how it will spend its resources and to whom it will provide aid, I think that the virtue of generous neighborliness, a virtue perhaps in decline at the individual and social level, would prompt a more permissive immigration policy toward our neighbors to the south, particularly insofar as their purpose in coming to the United States is generally to work and to escape near desperate living conditions. So a virtuous, although perhaps not an obligatory, response to our neighbors to the south would be a much more easily obtained work visa and a fast track for entrance for workers looking for jobs for which there is high demand.

The second I call the virtue of generous forgiveness. We are, to repeat, a prosperous and peaceful country; we make few demands of our citizens for personal sacrifice, and few of us know true want or desperation. Our form of self-governance—the way in which we determine what kind of a people we are to be—can take the shape of a willingness to forgive, as a society, the actions of our neighbors which were taken under duress and for generally noble motives, such as the desire to care for a family. This virtue prompts support for a general amnesty policy and perhaps a fast track to citizenship for some—not as an isolated act, to be repeated serially every ten or twenty years, but in conjunction with the meeting of our obligations as regards illegal immigration. Such an approach is not obligatory, but it would constitute us as a nation in a responsibly virtuous manner. This virtue would additionally need to be shared by those who had gained admission to the country legally, for they would need to forgive some amount of injustice done to them by those who had not followed the same legal protocols.

The right and obligation to enforce a non-vacuous immigration policy can thus go hand in hand with a virtuous approach both to our neighbors who wish to enter and our fellows who have entered illegally but from otherwise upright motives. What cannot co-exist with virtue or the fulfillment of obligations in justice is the maintenance of the current status quo.

Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Higher education is a gateway to the professions in modern democracies and it is also an institution that serves as a bulwark against ideological repression by the state and other powerful political forces who are all too often motivated to repress ideas that are unpopular or offensive (or both).

Having just covered nearly the entire range of disputed ideas over which there could conceivably be an effort at “ideological repression,” I was somewhat amused. Gutmann’s claims, particularly the second, struck me as rather self-congratulatory: look what a brave group we academics are, protecting our students from the powerful political forces seeking to illicitly mold their minds. But beyond that, her claims seemed to overlook both the level of ideological agreement that shapes the academic world together with the culture of Western liberal democracy more generally, and the more specific forms of disagreement that take place within that overarching framework of agreement—forms of disagreement that often do separate academics from at least many of their fellow citizens. These forms of agreement and disagreement do have implications for how we should think of at least one purpose of higher education, but they are more modest than the freedom-fighter conclusion reached by Gutmann.

What is the overarching form of agreement that shapes almost everyone in the United States—academics, students, and the general populace? It is surely a commitment to the most basic ideas of liberalism, broadly understood. Few in the West are likely to disagree with a liberalism whose core values revolve around an understanding of the human person as a being who is, or is to be, free, equal, and independent. The idea that domination and inequality are acceptable or desirable is outside the pale of Western cultural life. Nor is any powerful political force in the West seriously committed to repressing such liberal ideals. There are threats, no doubt, but they are not internal.

Yet that broad form of agreement does paper over very significant and divisive disagreements about the content of each of these core ideas of liberalism. Consider first the idea of freedom. Among some classical liberals and many contemporary “traditionally minded” religious persons and humanists, the first, though not the only, understanding of freedom for liberalism is metaphysical. Human beings are, in a deep sense, capable of making free choices, choices not governed by the laws of natural causality. This capacity, along with the equally “free-making” capacity to reason, has struck many thinkers as the ground for claims of human specialness and dignity. And it is our dignity that grounds, in turn, many of our other rights and responsibilities.

Contemporary metaphysical naturalists, however, are committed to a rejection of any special ontological pleading on behalf of human beings. We are on all fours, so to speak, with the rest of the animal kingdom—a claim with radical consequences for the treatment of both animals and human beings, as well as for the notion of dignity, a notion derided by some naturalists as “stupid.” So liberals divide significantly over the metaphysics of freedom.

Still, they coalesce once more under the rubric of political freedom. All liberals, both those holding a traditional understanding of freedom and those of a more naturalistic bent, recognize political liberty as a value to be realized both in the institutions of our common life and in the individual lives of citizens. Yet here again various strong disagreements permeate our common life: What precisely are the core liberties that must be preserved for a free people? How are those liberties to be specified? And how are they to be checked, if at all, by other values and norms? Is government, religion, or any other authority a threat to liberty as such, or can these also play a positive or even necessary role in the establishment of political freedom?

These questions point to an even deeper disagreement over liberty, for contemporary liberalism has frequently turned in the direction of an “autonomist” strain of thinking about freedom. On this view, it is sufficient for the rightness of an action, whether moral or merely political, that it have been freely or autonomously chosen, so long as it does not interfere with the freedom of another. External forms of authority and objective moral norms are both challenges to the possibility of freedom on such a view. By contrast, the view that freedom is possible only in truth sees adherence to moral truth as a necessary condition for any freedom worth having.

Such disagreements can be seen most clearly in cases involving sexual and reproductive liberties. Disputes over dualism and the merely experiential value of sex reflect the metaphysical disputes over freedom; disputes over the political importance of the family for the preservation of crucial freedoms reflect the second set of questions; and disputes over whether “reproductive choice” is a self-standing value or one governed by objective norms about marital love and procreation reflect the third. But all three disputes are, clearly, intertwined in ways that my very brief caricature cannot do justice to.

And these disputes are mirrored by further disputes over the remaining two values, equality and independence. Many of those thinkers who find the core idea of freedom to be a metaphysical notion believe also that the essential equality identified by liberalism is the equality of all human beings. Political societies have not always recognized just how broad the circle of equality must be drawn, and the positive gains of liberalism can often be framed as success stories in enlarging boundaries that had arbitrarily kept some human beings out. Similarly, current failures, such as those surrounding human embryos and fetuses, represent ways in which liberalism has failed on its own terms to honor basic human equality.

Yet other contemporary thinkers who are certainly also to be considered “liberals” in a broad sense divide the category of the human into those who are “persons” and those who are not. My students in Contemporary Moral Problems, for example, read an essay by the philosopher Jeff McMahan in which he advocated a two-tiered morality, a morality of persons (called by some “personism”) in which all persons were to be treated equally, and morality of those non-person beings who nevertheless have “interests” which determine the degree of consideration they are owed. Because, for example, severely cognitively impaired human beings are not persons, on this account, but have interests much like those of many non-human animals, McMahan draws the conclusion that “severely retarded human beings who lack [the] capacities that distinguish persons from animals cannot be entitled, by virtue of their intrinsic natures, to the moral protections enjoyed by persons.” Similar claims can be found in recent literature about those in a permanent coma or a so-called persistent vegetative state. Thus equality, though a value endorsed broadly in our society, is nevertheless subject to radically differing interpretations with radically different moral consequences.

Some critics of liberalism, such as Michael Sandel and Alasdair MacIntyre, have charged the liberal tradition with emphasizing, in unrealistic and sometimes dangerous ways, the “independence” of the human person. This claim overlaps with some already mentioned here: Radical claims to independence can lead human beings to reject any moral tradition or authority on which one might be dependent. Similarly radical claims can lead to a rejection of those human beings who are profoundly dependent—such as fetuses, neonates, and the profoundly retarded—as outside the boundaries of moral equality. At the level of moral obligation, emphasis on independence and autonomy together can lead to the idea that there are no obligations save those that have been voluntarily accepted. And the emphasis on independence can lead to a world in which the social structures necessary for human flourishing are dismantled, competitive and consumerist values rule, and everyone bowls alone.

Yet again, we are all liberals in some sense. Even the most trenchant critics of the liberal ideal of independence still recognize the value for children in being brought, through education, to an ability to recognize for themselves moral truth and to critically think for themselves about what they have been taught. No critic of liberalism advocates a life of practical deliberation by proxy. And all recognize that those human beings who are more or less constantly in a state of radical dependence should nevertheless be encouraged to have what opportunities for independence they may be capable of. So again, agreement and disagreement shape the intellectual and cultural landscape of liberalism with regard to this core value.

So if Gutmann’s educational bulwark against ideological repression is seen as establishing a firewall between defenders of liberalism and its core values of freedom, equality and independence, and repressive forces outside the academy but within the West, then, it should be seen as protecting against largely fictional enemies and achieving mostly specious victories.

But perhaps Gutmann meant not that liberalism should be defended within academia against the forces of darkness outside, but rather that a specific interpretation of liberalism should be? For it cannot be denied that most of the essays my students read, and most of the positions held by their professors here and at other institutions of higher education, coalesce around one particular and more or less coherent understanding of freedom, equality, and independence, a largely naturalistic, political, personistic, and individualistic form of liberalism. Could it be the mission of higher education to protect this form of liberalism against competing interpretations, perhaps even by mislabeling such interpretations as illiberal and repressive?

It is not possible here for me to argue adequately for a competing vision. Rather, I will merely suggest one. One task of higher education is precisely to make students aware of, and to initiate them intelligently and fairly into, the disputes within liberalism that I have at most only outlined here, and into the ensuing moral and political debates and controversies that follow from these core disagreements. Such an initiation would enable students both to better understand themselves and their social world, and to participate more intelligently and critically in that world’s controversies and crises—those over, for example, embryo research and abortion, euthanasia and assisted suicide, the nature of marriage, or immigration and health care reform. While recognizing real and substantive disagreement, this approach would not see academics as primarily an “us” versus an unenlightened “them” with whom we share no fundamental liberal values, but rather as participants in an ongoing set of arguments. Initiating students into the arguments within liberalism is perhaps a more modest task than that envisaged by Gutmann, but it is not, for all that, an easy or insignificant one.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Thiessen’s defense of “enhanced interrogation tactics,” including waterboarding, has been especially striking for his reliance on the conceptual apparatus of the Catholic moral tradition. That tradition has held that the state has a duty to protect its citizens against aggression, and that in prosecuting that duty the state may use force, even lethal force.

Thiessen has further identified the principle of double effect as essential to this justification: the harm that is done to an assailant is licit, by this principle, only if it lies outside the intention of the agent who causes the harm. According to Thiessen, the intent of the interrogator “is not to cause harm to the detainee; rather it is to render the aggressor unable to cause harm to society. The act of coercive interrogation can have a double effect (to protect society and to cause harm to the terrorist) but one is intended, the other is not.”

One might ask how the subject of a coercive interrogation is to be understood as a “threat.”  In most examples of defense against an aggressor where double effect is implicated, the aggressor physically threatens, and force is used to repel that threat, even if it is foreseen that harm, and even lethal harm, will be done as a consequence of the repelling—if, for example, it is done with a gun, or a bomb. Thiessen’s claim is interesting in this regard: the suspect is a threat in virtue of his knowledge of an impending attack, and protecting against this threat requires inducing the suspect to give up the information that he is concealing.

In this essay, I do not address the question of Catholic teaching on torture or “torture lite,” as enhanced interrogation is sometimes called. I think that Thiessen is correct in thinking that the teaching of the Catechism is not obviously definitive in ruling out torture for interrogatory reasons, since the Catechism does not specifically mention interrogatory torture by name. However, the Catechism’s repudiation of a number of other kinds of torture as “contrary to respect for the person and for human dignity” is quite strong, and its mention of torture “to extract confessions” could perhaps be read broadly to include interrogatory torture. It does not seem unlikely that stronger statements regarding this form of torture will be forthcoming from the magisterium.

I do not question Thiessen’s motives, honesty, or good will. He is correct that defense of society is a foundational obligation of public servants, and he himself performs an important public service by encouraging serious reflection on what is morally permissible and practically necessary in pursuit of this end. Additionally, as I mention below, the infliction of some pain should probably not be considered torture, and is not intrinsically impermissible.

Nevertheless, there are difficulties in relying of the principle of double effect in this case. And it is those difficulties, when considered in light of the limits of the permissible infliction of pain, which cast doubt on the legitimacy of waterboarding a suspect for the sake of obtaining information he might possess.

The essential difficulty in Thiessen’s argument is his application of double-effect reasoning. Double effect has its primary application in the domain of what one is doing, where what one does, including the consequences of what one does, will encompass both good and evil effects. Thus, I consider the possibility of taking medicine to cure a disease, and realize that taking that medicine will not only cure me, but also cause me to lose my vision. I may be said both to have cured my disease and to have brought on blindness, but, insofar as it was only the cure that I intended, and blindness was only foreseen, but not chosen, then bringing on blindness was not part of my act in the fullest sense—the sense that encompasses all and only what I intended.

This analysis has application where an attacker is physically prevented from fulfilling what he has set out to do: I stop the attacker by hitting, or shooting, or stabbing him. Stopping, or repelling, is what I intend, and the harm that I thereby cause is, when I act rightly, outside my intention. But in the case of interrogation, what is envisaged—the end pursued by the interrogator—is, in fact, something that is to be done by the suspect. This is a difficulty, because what I do ends, under most circumstances, with the choice of another agent to do something. I can, of course, establish conditions under which others will be motivated to do something, but its being done is still their doing, not mine.

Now this raises a problem for the double effect defense of harsh interrogation for the following reason. If there are two effects, as on Thiessen’s analysis, and the good one—the suspect revealing critical information and thus ceasing to be a threat—is not strictly speaking a part or consequence of my action, but is rather the action of another, then the double-effect analysis seems stalled: what I am doing, it seems, is causing the harmful effect, with a view to establishing conditions that will induce the suspect to bring about the beneficial effects.

If this is so, then the question must return to whether some particular tactic—waterboarding, for example, or mutilation, or sensory deprivation, to give three very different examples—is in fact a form of harm that is intended by the interrogator. For the double effect defense identifies the intention to harm as one that is impermissible. The agent who physically repels an attacker need not, to reiterate, intend any harm at all: his intention is only to use force to stop the aggression. Is there, then, something that the interrogator intends that is other than harm, which has the consequence of creating conditions that make it more likely than not that the suspect will confess?

Since pain is not itself a form of harm, there might well be. On this view, pain, because it is not a harm but rather is a sign of proper physiological functioning of an organism, is not something that it is intrinsically impermissible to intend. While this view seems implausible to some, it is not without merit: A dentist may try to create pain in your mouth in order to diagnose the location of a cavity. And, if spanking children is permissible it must be because the infliction of pain just as such is not morally impermissible.

So the infliction of some pain, ranging from various forms of minor discomfort to something presumably quite unpleasant might be permissible as a way of inducing another to render himself no longer a threat. But here is the location of what I will call the Torturer’s Dilemma.

The morally upright interrogational torturer wishes to create conditions in which the suspect will talk. One way that this could be done would be to create conditions in which it is impossible for the suspect not to talk: to create conditions of such agony that the suspect is no longer in control of his actions and literally has no choice but to speak. The intention is to push the agent past his breaking point, to break him down so that he is less of an agent and more of a tool of the interrogator.

I take it that this intention will be rejected by anyone who accepts the basic framework of double effect for the analysis of interrogation: the intention to break someone down is an intention to harm them, and that is morally impermissible. We should note, in passing, that if this is how interrogational torture is defined—as the attempt to break down a suspect so as to force him to talk—then there is an absolute moral norm against torture.

I have argued previously on Public Discourse that it is very hard to see repeated application of the techniques of enhanced interrogation as anything other than an attempt to break down the suspect, and nowhere is this more true than in the case of waterboarding. To waterboard someone repeatedly, multiple times a day for many days, seems like an attempt to grievously damage another human being.

Thus one side of the Torturer’s Dilemma: the infliction of pain to this point is a form of harm (and there are various other ways of inflicting harm as well that are more direct than the infliction of unbearable pain—mutilations, for example).

But, on the other side, the interrogational torturer, by my account, can inflict some pain for the sake of inducing a suspect to talk. And perhaps, given this, someone like Abdulmutallab, unlike Khalid Sheik Mohammed, ought to have been subjected to somewhat more inducement to provide information. He ought, perhaps, to have been made somewhat less, rather than more comfortable. Yet the limits of such an approach seem clear: a level of pain that falls short of harming a suspect by beginning to disintegrate his psycho-somatic functioning is hardly likely to induce a serious terrorist to answer questions voluntarily. When compared against other forms of interrogation, such as those that attempt to gain the suspect’s trust and confidence, a form of interrogation using only this degree of pain—a degree that would not begin to break the suspect down—might in fact have little to recommend itself.

I suspect that a single application of waterboarding does not constitute torture, and can be done without an intention to harm. Those who have assisted journalists, such as Christopher Hitchens, or military personnel, in being waterboarded, certainly did not intend them harm. But is there any reason to think that such one-off applications of this technique would provide serious intelligence? And how could one be sure, save by further applications, to the point at which one was convinced that the suspect was not holding out?

In any event, the upshot of my discussion is this: if, as the double effect defense presupposes, waterboarding or some other interrogation technique is done in a way that is expected to cause harm to the suspect, then that harm is most likely intended as a means by the interrogator and double effect will not justify it. And if such techniques are performed with the intention to cause pain, but not either direct physical harm, or psychological disintegration, then they are likely to be ineffective. Either way, it is, in my view, a good thing that United States’ policy has moved (as it did in the second Bush term) beyond the grim, if understandable, policies of the first few years after 9/11.


Christopher O. Tollefsen is Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute. His latest book, co-authored with Robert P. George, is Embryo: A Defense of Human Life (Doubleday, 2008). Tollefsen sits on the editorial board of Public Discourse.

Copyright 2010 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.